In the last couple weeks, I’ve encountered a bunch of statements or situations that revealed a sort of frightening social truth to me: a lot of men, and a lot of women too, believe that feminism is no longer necessary because society is equal. As you’ll hear next week when I air the interview I just recorded with Jim Kunstler, he mentions that women were angered by his portrayal of women in the post-carbon future as being secondary and subjugated. And his defense was to point to women’s “failure of imagination to conceive of a society that was different from the one they had today”, implying of course that the society we have today is completely equal. He then proceeded to make some pretty condescending and dismissive remarks about how our little fights in such areas like pay equity and suffrage will not matter in a world where we have no fossil fuels. That the struggle for equality has been a luxury of this industrialized heyday, and that it will go the way of ipads and interstates in our post-carbon future.
He is not the only place I’ve encountered this attitude – the Women’s Week issue of Critic, for example, is completely riddled with assumptions like this. Like we’re all completely equal now because Pepsi has a female CEO – we’re post-gender in the same way America having a black president makes us post-racial. Patently ridiculous, obviously. If anything, having minorities in positions of power can actually increase, or at least normalize, bigotry – political dissent being culturally acceptable and even encouraged, racism and sexism simply become part of the criticism of power when that power is black or female. People can get away with speaking in those terms because the racism or sexism or classism is couched in the rhetoric of political opposition, and attempts to highlight the discriminatory basis for that opposition is attacked as censorship. For that reason racist statements about the american president or sexist ones against Helen Clark or Hillary Clinton are becoming more and more overt and acceptable – it normalizes extremism.
