Andi Zeisler of Bitch magazine: 'Feminism isn't supposed to be fun'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/10/andi-zeisler-book-we-were-feminists-once-bitch-magazine

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Andi Zeisler didn’t start off to critique the feminist movement’s engagement with pop culture. As one of the three founders of the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, she set out in 1995 to use feminism as a lens to look at how movies, television shows, advertisements and other magazines created and reinforced negative stereotypes about women and their roles in the world.

In her new book, We Were Feminists Once, she says: “I always believed that the realm of media and popular culture was where feminism would truly change hearts and minds.” But in the years since they launched, believing “that there had to be other frustrated feminist pop-culture obsessives out there”, the word “feminism” went from being a term from which celebrities and pop culture shied away, to one they embraced.

And feminism itself went from being a movement designed to achieve gender equity to, for large numbers of women, a personal justification for liking (or disliking) various celebrities, buying certain products and consuming various bits of pop culture.

A certain kind of feminism has become fun, because of the efforts of many feminists to make the movement more popular and more acceptable. “The problem is – the problem has always been – that feminism is not fun,” Ziesler writes. “It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s complex and hard and it pisses people off. It’s serious because it is about people demanding that their humanity be recognized as valuable.” It’s hard to compare that to “feminist pedicure day”.

So in a world of feminist weddings and feminist yoghurt, serious feminist debates about appropriate pubic hair grooming regimens and serious feminist fights about whether or not Beyoncé is feminist enough for the masses, is there any room to demand that feminism be less fun and more work? Have feminists fought so hard against the hairy-legged, bra-burning stereotypes that they’ve depilated their bodies and pushed up their bosoms and squinched their toes into uncomfortable shoes to make feminism attractive to men and other women – and thereby made it stand for everything and mean nothing?

After reading her book, I had plenty of questions for Zeisler (and more than a little bit of guilt for my own participation in the commodification of feminism). She, of course, had some answers.

You talk a lot about the idea that feminism has become more of an individual identity than a movement in the book, but where do you think this particular idea comes from – this idea that you have to define all of your actions as feminist?

A lot of it, historically, comes from insecurity – people are constantly being judged for their politics and being weighed on this scale of righteousness and always being in danger of not measuring up. Feminism, among social movements, has been tasked with a lot. There’s a lot of expectation, there’s a lot of potential for disappointment, there’s a lot of internal strife and infighting around judgment and around people feeling like they have to be paragons in a lot of ways.

And there is an idea very much in the culture now around redefining things as “feminist” even when there’s no apparent feminist aspect. To me, a lot of that strikes me as people wanting to do what they want to do anyway, but feeling like they need to justify it to both themselves and to the larger world as something “feminist”.

One of the early rallying cries of second-wave feminism was the idea that the personal was political. And yet today, in a very real way, the politically personal is everything from your ability to choose to wax your crotch, as you talked about in the book, to your ability to wear makeup: everything is reconstructed as a political act, as opposed to being thought of as engaging in an imperfect system.

I think there’s been a real over-investment in this idea of the personal being political. So much of second-wave feminism and of consciousness raising really was [personal and political]. It’s probably hard for a lot of people to understand now how groundbreaking it was that you would get together with a bunch of women and realize that many of your shared experiences that you had been told or led to believe were exclusively your problem were not. And that was absolutely an earth-shaking thing.

But we’ve gotten to this point where it’s like everything that is personal is also political – it is a kind of a twisting of the original idea of “the personal is political”. It never meant that everything that’s personal is political, but here we are with bikini waxing as a political statement. I don’t know if that’s progress. I do think it exists on a continuum of progress and it exists alongside a lot of amazing grassroots stuff that’s also happening. But there are layers of feminist awareness and the one with which people now usually first come into contact is this idea that if you’re a feminist, everything you do must somehow be bent to fit this idea of your own personal politics, even if it might be or should be inherently apolitical.

The line you had in the book that possibly might make my Twitter bio is the idea that we never see a man write a piece like Does My Back, Sack and Crack Wax Betray My Marxism? Even though a lot of feminists ascribe to the idea that consumerism is harmful to women’s progress towards equality, we don’t see men engage with these ideas in the same way.

I do think we see a lot more acknowledgement these days that men don’t get off easy in the body-imperative marketplace. But while men are definitely scrutinized in many of the same ways [as women] – body grooming and baldness and being sexy and having a lot of sexual stamina – the difference is that they don’t often have to defend their personal or physical or sexual choices as political ones. That’s something that people are often missing when you hear pushback like: “Oh, men have to deal with this too!” Well, yeah, they do, but they have to deal with it in a very fundamentally different way that doesn’t usually reflect on their politics or on their sense of validity as a political actor.

Obviously, women judging other women and suggesting that they’re not good enough has a long and storied history well outside of the feminist movement. Is there a sense inside the movement that we’re still constantly weighing women against other women, as opposed to weighing our actions against men’s?

It often is the case that it’s easier to nitpick one another’s expressions of feminism than to confront the much thornier question of why are we still struggling to convince the larger world that this is a valid movement that needs to exist. Feminism has to spend a ridiculous amount of time justifying its reason for existing – there are so many conversations about feminism that are still starting from the point of “Here’s why we need feminism” and a million people pushing back, being like “No, we don’t need feminism.” We end up starting on the defensive, because there’s still a ton of hostility to the very idea that feminism is a thing that needs to exist.

It does also seem like we find ourselves competing for space and for access with other women, rather than feeling like we’re competing with men.

Totally, because there’s still this incredibly weird belief that men don’t have and should not be expected to have a stake in feminism. And we’re still in this place as women where we feel we don’t want to take that up with them, because we’re like: ‘Oh, look at how little we have, look at how much danger there is in losing what little we have, we better not piss anyone off, we’d better not rock the boat.’ It’s much easier to take issue with each other’s feminism, because it’s an end run around the real systemic issues. It’s a huge bummer.

To pick the most obvious example of someone who is constantly rejected by a certain group of feminists, can we talk about Beyoncé? I have a lot of feelings about a feminism that is constantly rejecting people that actively want to be part of it.

That was a real theme that I wanted to engage with in the book, but I’m also very aware of the fact that people are going to interpret my analysis as judgment in a lot of ways. There was a piece that ran here in Portland in a local paper and, basically, the writer sort of reverse-engineered a review of my book that makes it sound like I’m commenting on Lemonade, but I wasn’t. It’s her putting words in my mouth in this very upsetting way and, of course, the way the piece is titled and shared on social media is this clickbait, like: “Oh Portland author doesn’t think that Beyoncé’s feminism is real enough.” And I fully expect that to happen because that’s the easiest place to go.

Again, it’s so much easier to go to that place of feminist-on-feminist sniping than it is to say: “Look, we are all losing within this system because we’re made to think that we have to compete for legitimacy and resources and a sense of being the best of the purest feminist.” But ultimately, that takes the heat off the system that really needs to change so that we’re not in the position where there can be only one.

The idea that feminism is like Highlander – “There can be only one!” – is something I’ve been joking about for years. Do we really run around and rhetorically chop each other’s heads off with swords until one of us is the most perfect, bright, pure, powerful feminist and that’s the person who will change the world?

It comes back to the idea that if we could only make feminism palatable to the outside world, then we’d really be getting somewhere. But then all this energy is put into making feminism palatable by trying to weed out anything that isn’t the purest feminist expression and endlessly arguing over what that means because that’s so subjective. This is not a good use of time and energy in a realm where there are so many unfinished projects and the people who most need feminism don’t give a shit about who is the purest feminist; they just want to eat, they just want to keep the lights on.

We’re at a very weird place right now because, in a lot of ways, I do think there’s a ton of grassroots activism, there’s a ton of movement and there’s a ton of really nuanced analysis of where feminism is and where it needs to go that is completely drowned out by questions like: “Is Beyoncé a feminist because she’s not wearing any pants 90% of the time?” That’s not a helpful question in the larger project of feminism, but that’s the thing that is going to get the loudest megaphone.