Double X

The end of one-size-fits-all feminism | Tamara Winfrey Harris | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The end of one-size-fits-all feminism

As Slate's new site for women, Double X, points out, we need more than one point of view in feminism



I was prepared to hate Double X. See, I read about Slate's new online magazine for women before I read it. The site, spawn of the now defunct Slate blog XX Factor, has sparked a load of controversy in the feminist blogosphere. It's no wonder. Since it launched on Tuesday, Double X has posted a succession of articles aggressively critical of feminism. In fact, on the day of the site's premiere, writer Linda Hirshman penned a finger-wagging piece blasting the popular third-wave feminist blog, Jezebel, for encouraging young women in promiscuity and reckless boozing.

Feminism is about women's equality. Double X is a magazine for women. That the site would launch with a litany of "hackneyed anti-feminist pieces" does not compute. Here's a taste of what I found there:

But the feminism of the first and second wave has never been the feminism (or the womanism) of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. For example, take the question of whether to work. What some women struggled with as a point of politics, my foremothers had done simply as a matter of survival. Feminism framed the issues in a way that spoke to different women from all walks of life – then presented solutions that tended to favour women of a certain race and class.

Ironically, my lesbianism had something to do with this disenchantment with mainstream or 'institutional' feminism. There was always a difficulty, of course (even in the 70s one had puzzled over it): namely, what one's straight 'sisters' were going to do. How would they ever reconcile a putative belief in women's emancipation with what so often seemed an utterly depressing erotic and psychological fealty to men?

As a generation of young women is discovering, and as polemicists from Camille Paglia to Ariel Levy have pointed out, there's something missing in both points of view. Women can pretend they're female chauvinist pigs, but it's still women who are more sexually vulnerable to stronger men, due to the possibilities of physical abuse and pregnancy.

I was prepared to hate Double X, but I do not. There is truth in these critiques, if not necessarily for me, for some women. What many of Double X's contributors seem to be railing about is feminism with a capital "F" – the tired movement that tilts at old windmills and believes that the needs of a small group of women – generally white, urban, upper middle class, liberal, heterosexual, cisgendered, American women – are the needs of every woman. The real struggle for women's equality has always been about feminisms – many movements for many women of many races and many classes and many ages and many political persuasions in many countries and places.

One-size-fits-all feminism is a lie, because one-size-fits-all womanhood is a lie; so, too, the one-size-fits-all formula for women's media. Double X is markedly different from popular and high-traffic feminist blogs such as Jezebel and Feministing. That is ok. Those sites represent only one way to talk about and to women.

I do not agree with every point of view on Double X. Hirshman's screed, with its blaming of female victims of assault, was loathsome. But criticising Double X for not adequately representing women is as misguided as Hirshman accusing Jezebel of harming women. The modern women's movement is broad enough to encompass more than one point of view. One-size-fits-all feminism is dead. Long live feminism.