I've promised to make a post on American feminism and how it differs from my own, more African variety of feminism. Communication styles differ from one place to another.
Having engaged very heavily in political and ideological debates on the Internet since around the time of its inception, 1996, I've come to the conclusion that my communication style is a world apart from the manner of interaction most commonly observable in the American "culture wars".
Quite simply, the majority of Americans just have a very different way of looking at the world. What I've actually written, and what those words I've written are commonly interpreted to mean, are entirely opposite in many instances. I wrote recently, for instance, that my man, my ape, my significant girl-fling was "a man with a warrior mentality". This was taken to mean that my ape was a male in shining armor, who could rescue me from any panic-stricken moments of distress.
The opposite is true. The American who responded to my statement presumed it meant I hadn't evolved in 50 years. Actually, I've been evolving all 44, and my pronouncement ought to have been read along much more Sadean lines in that I enjoy a male as he is, have no desire to domesticate him and appreciate him close to Nature.
American anti-feminism wants me to say something else, though -- and so much so, it puts words into my mouth. Those are the female-haters. On the opposite side of the fence, American self-nominated feminists won't talk even talk to me. Both are grinding their axes in ways that I don't fully understand, after all, what is the point in talking past each other or addressing each other as though one had encountered statements that were mentally deranged? There's no way to get to the bottom of someone else's reality in that way.
Americans seem to attempt to define motives in terms of stereotypes. The gender wars are defined by people aggressively expressing what they need, whilst fending off the opposition as a mere caricature, an ogre, a gender identity from a children's fairy book.
Quasi-religious ideas about moral purification also run through the gender debates like a network of blue veins in smelly cheese. Should it be pointed out that one has "unearned privileges", one is supposed to purify oneself from within, via a pirouette and three mea culpas. This often doesn't suffice to purify one's public identity, but no matter about that, there is the afterlife, the feminist future, if the inner penitence is genuinely pure.
African feminism is, by contrast, simpler. We don't want to be treated as merely "emotional" creatures, or to be beaten up or to be deemed patriarchal property. We're united with other women on this opposition to patriarchal culture. At stake are political and practical issues, rather than the moral status of the individual man or woman after they have undergone inward sanctifying rituals.
Typically Americans engage with each other to demand that their needs will be met. They require that strangers, whom they have barely even met on the Internet, affirm their specific identities as they have defined them. When you can't be bothered to affirm the novel, unique or simply ordinary identity, you are punished by having a very negative definition bestowed on you. This can be in the form of any name at all. An acquaintance of mine was recently defined as "sociopathic" for failing to validate an Internet stranger's novel self-definition.
In all, Americans are a needy bunch, if hard of hearing. African feminism has its problems too. There's too much Christianity and female martyrdom implicit and explicit in it. Despite this, African feminists communicate more clearly than their Western counterparts and they listen.
Could it be that Americans are not so much in need of a feminist solution to social problems in comparison to my fellow Africans? If they needed a practical solution, they would surely be working in more practical ways.
*PS. I can never outdo you with the mere productive zeal of your stereotyping, so no complaining!
No comments:
Post a Comment