Stop platforming the bobbleheads

I strive to not label myself as being any particular sort of feminist or, indeed, even a feminist at all because to me, feminism should be an aspiration, not an identity. It should be a behavior, not a label. Also, while I think my feminist aspirations run closer to radical feminism than to any other sort of feminism, self-identified radical feminists tend to make it too much like a revealed religion for my tastes. (That is outside the scope of this post, but I may address it here eventually.) Plus, many of them insist we should be vegan, and that’s a complete nonstarter for me. So I don’t call myself a radfem either.

I said all that because I’m about to be mean about a well-known liberal feminist, and I just know someone’s going to call me out and accuse me of lack of solidarity or some such thing. Well, you can think what you want. There are larger issues at stake here, and I feel it’s antifeminist to ignore them. You can agree. You can disagree. I don’t really care. At least I’m allowed to say this out loud here, and you would have to pay to annoy me about it.

Recently, a friend of mine directed me to this post by Zawn. You will have seen Zawn all over social media. I began finding her tiresome long ago when I realized she bought into gender identity. She does have some superb insights, but she muddles it up with religious ideation (see also: gender identity) and intellectual dishonesty (see also: gender identity). It’s a shame. She does, however, present an excellent example of what is wrong with third-wave or “liberal” feminism.

I sometimes call these women “bobbleheads” because they seem very artificial and also inordinately fond of nodding along to the most dumbshit political ideas possible (see also: gender identity). If they ever had any ability to think for themselves or to actually engage with material reality as it is, they nodded that ability right out their heads along with their brains years ago. It doesn’t help that most of them also still employ the trappings of patriarchal femininity, so they’ve got that whole plastic fakey-fake smiley Barbie vibe going on. When they don’t go the other direction and opt for blue hair and so much metal in their faces that they’d set off an airport metal detector. But I digress.

(You’re rushing now to go examine what I look like. Child, there’s a reason it’s the ugly women adopting a more second-wave or radfem stance. When we said patriarchal femininity was oppressive, we meant it: we have literally lost opportunities for relationships, friendships, and employment because we refused to — or couldn’t — Barbie up. The trajectory of no one’s life should depend on how beautiful that person is; for men, it never does unless they’re clearly deformed, and often not even then. “You’re feminist ‘cause you’re ugly” is an indictment of this stupid culture, not a flex on feminist women.)

So. The essay. It starts out with “give me more free material so I can make money off your misery because clearly I’m incapable of reading any fucking headlines whatsoever” and segues into a letter from a reader, and I hope that reader will forgive me, because I’m going to completely reproduce the part Zawn shared here:

Hi. I am a mum of a fourteen years old girl. Although I am specialized in critical thinking and non hegemonic history, my girl seems obsessed with beauty and appearance. All that she does or think during her day is connected to how attractive she might be, whether she will meet a boy who will want “to have something” with her (which is an euphemistic way of saying wanting to engage in fast, opportunistic and only driven to sexual relations). She puts socks under her underwear to simulate she has big boobies and she refuses to talk about that.

In general she refuses to talk about much; all she wants is to fit in. And apparently she only thinks she can fit in through her body exposure. How can i get to arouse her interest in other ways of relating to herself and the others?

Okay, here is what I’m “hearing” as I read this:

“I have always been the intellectual sort, and I kind of hoped my daughter would take after me, but instead she has gravitated toward beauty culture and attracting boys. Also she seems to only be connecting to other people through beauty and sexuality and really, those are a shallow basis upon which to form friendships. I feel she is wasting her potential because she’s growing up and she needs to be exploring other areas of life. How do I encourage her to do that?”

Am I just nuts or did you read it that way too?

Also, I get the sense that this is the writer’s first teenager and may indeed be her only child. We tend to forget how sex-obsessed we were at that age; our sex hormones were at the highest levels they will ever be again. Some of us will look back on that time later with fond nostalgia. Many will look back upon it in abject horror. No parent is ever ready for it when it happens to their kids. I remember my daughter telling me at age thirteen that she was bisexual, and she will tell you to this day that I was upset about that. I wasn’t upset about her liking both girls and boys. I was upset because I had just been forced to put the ideas “sexual” and “my thirteen-year-old minor daughter who I swear to fuck was just a newborn the day before yesterday” together in the same thought, and it was really messing with my head. Every parent of a teenager goes through this if they’re any sort of responsible and non-creepy at all.

Zawn, of course, couldn’t grant her reader even that little bit of grace. Like every good little bobblehead, she went straight to assuming the worst — or just making shit up as she went along.

You are trying to control your daughter’s body and how she presents it to the world. This is regressive and harmful.

You… you did understand that a sock is not a body part? That if you stuff your bra with socks, that is not “your body” that you are presenting to the world? You are instead presenting socks to the world. In your bra.

Makeup? That’s not body parts either. Neither is a short skirt. Neither is a low-cut top. (I’m assuming here, but frequently when teenage girls get sex-obsessed, that’s how they tend to dress. Or try to — unsuccessfully, with parents of any real caliber whatsoever.) These are all artificial things that are not part of a girl’s body. Or a boy’s body. Or anyone’s body.

And I want to draw your attention here to the word regressive. These days, what passes for “leftist politics,” but isn’t really, amounts to whether a viewpoint is “progressive” or not. That is so lazy. Progressing where? From where? That’s your measure of good politics now, whether a political situation is moving forward? I thought we were aiming for liberation here. I don’t care which direction you’ve got to move to make liberation happen, that ought to be the ultimate goal. What happened here? How did we become so infested with progress fetish? Because that’s what it is. Is it reasonable for a mature adult to regulate what a minor child, whose brain is still developing and who therefore operates largely on inexperienced impulse, should and should not wear outside the house? Is it “regressive” to forbid your teenage son going to school naked? Why or why not? And in the context of liberation, does it make your daughter more free or less free if she is wearing clothes to school that, in the minds of most teenage boys, are code for “I am down for anything with anyone at any time”? Bobbleheads love to say that clothing has no inherent meaning. It doesn’t, but it does have assigned cultural meaning. That meaning may change over time, but our business is not with what a short skirt meant a thousand years ago or with what the short skirt could mean a century into the future. We have to think about what it means now. What does a short skirt mean to teenage boys? Is this a thing your daughter wants to say to them? If so, why? Has she thought through the possible outcomes if the boys get that message loud and clear?

This is a teenage girl we’re talking about. The answer is no.

So it’s the grownup’s job to regulate a child — and this is a child — until that child is mature enough to regulate herself. She’s not there yet. Chill your behind, lady.

Nah, she ain’t chillin.

An interest in appearance is a result of patriarchal conditioning and a form of victimization, NOT a sign that your daughter has failed in any particular way.

An interest in appearance is a normal human trait. It has been warped and perverted, in this case, to serve patriarchy.

Mom didn’t say a damn thing about feeling her daughter has failed. Cutting yourself is also a result of damaging conditioning and of victimization but are we supposed to keep letting a girl cut herself? Of course not. So why are we going to ignore that she’s acting out her trauma at the hands of patriarchy by dressing in a self-exposing way? We need to be enabling her to feel that she can dress comfortably and in a way that appropriately protects her physical privacy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

I will concede that a whole LOT of parents need to learn how to do this in a way that doesn’t further victimize the child. You don’t get your teenage girl to stop buying into patriarchal conditioning by telling her that she’s a slut if she wears a short skirt, dumbasses. But Mom hasn’t even mentioned doing that here. Given the typical outcomes of teen pregnancy, she’s justified in being worried that her daughter might be having sex now, but she has assigned no moral value to this.

(Relatedly, I am completely done with the word modesty as relates to a girl’s or woman’s mode of dress or her general behavior. That’s outside the scope of this post, but maybe I’ll tackle it later.)

Anyway. And yet again:

You are likely greatly underestimating your daughter because of your own obsession with how she presents to the world.

Bad faith, lies, slander, and calumny.

Mom is in a unique position in this phase of her daughter’s life to be able to accurately assess whether her daughter is living up to her potential. Mom has access to Daughter’s grades and teacher reports. If Daughter were holding up her end of things at school, Mom would have said so. Or, possibly Mom wouldn’t have written in at all because she wouldn’t be feeling hopeless about Daughter’s future prospects. If this were a total stranger making unflattering observations about a scantily-clad teenager, I’d scoff at them too. This is Mom. I don’t know what it is with bobblehead liberals thinking mothers don’t know anything about anything, but it really needs to fucking stop.

Does Zawn even have children? She claims to be writing for mothers primarily. I feel like I looked it up once, but I can’t remember now. I could look now, but Zawn annoys me. Maybe later.

Zawn again:

Here you have set up an interest in appearance as diametrically opposed to an interest in critical thinking and history. Why is that? And what do you think it reveals? Shaming women for the choices they make about their own appearance is a tool of patriarchy, not feminism.

No, Mom has noted that all her daughter cares about is appearance (and sex, apparently) and doesn’t care about anything else. If Daughter cared about anything else, there would be evidence. Mom is not speaking from bobbleheaded “theory.” Mom is making a direct observation.

But while we’re on the subject, when do we ever see a woman who is massively obsessed with makeup, hair, nails and all the rest turn out to be an expert in critical thinking and history? It’s pretty fucking rare. Society already doesn’t listen to women when we intellectualize. It expects beautiful women to be stupid. It expects beautiful women who Barbie up to be even more stupid. If society already doesn’t listen to homely intellectual women, why would it listen to intellectual Barbies? Even women of lesser intellectual capacity are usually not stupid. They see what’s going on. They’re doing the math. A woman known for her looks is usually going to center most of her life effort around those looks, how she maintains them, what they mean to her, how someone else can recreate them, and so on. She’s not out there working on developing cold fusion or brain transplants. If you see evidence to the contrary, PLEASE do share with the class. We’d all LOVE to see that.

And it is a completely legitimate parenting sort of thing to ask your daughter why she’s stuffing her bra. Girls who actually develop breasts of significant size are usually ashamed of them because boys sexually harass them for having grown them. Other girls notice this, so why’s Daughter trying to imitate a physical state that brings nothing but embarrassment and grief to the girls genuinely in that state? Either she’s oblivious to social situations or she’s trying to attract a specific boy who prefers a girl with a larger cup size. If it’s obliviousness to social situations, it deserves some attention and remedy from adults before she ends up in the adult world unable to navigate it. Mom really does need to find out what’s going on.

The rest of Zawn’s word salad is just bullshit but I want to draw your attention to this other bullet-item accusation she also lobs at Mom:

inadvertently suggesting to your daughter that she can care about her appearance or her intelligence, but not both

Daughter is already not attending to both. Daughter is already only attending to one. This is a done thing. It is fucking happening. It’s not a suggestion. It’s the reality.

Zawn wants very badly for Mom to only be theorizing about everything and to be catastrophizing and to actually have no fucking clue what’s going on and to therefore be a political oppressor of her own daughter when what’s happening is Mom wants to be sure Daughter is prepared to go out into the world without having to immediately depend on a man because she has trained for literally no other fucking outcome.

Because that’s what it means when girls and young women focus only on dating.

Ask me how I know.

What blows my mind about my general social-media situation is that I keep seeing women in my friends/contacts lists platforming this fool and sharing everything she writes and memes. I’ve said over and over, “This woman does not even know what a woman is,” but that never stops them. This woman can continue giving bad advice to women with a wide, wide audience and makes money doing it because none of you pay attention to what you’re sharing.

So if you really want to make a difference for women and girls without having to exert huge amounts of effort (or spend huge amounts of money), I offer this suggestion: Stop platforming the bobbleheads. Don’t share them. Don’t reblog them. Don’t quote them. Don’t meme them. Don’t pay them.

Mom deserved better than this treatment. Daughter deserves a WHOLE lot better.