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J. Flint's avatar

Another well-thought-out contribution to this ongoing kerfuffle, Dani. I admire you for not giving up out of sheer weariness of interacting with Rigney and his supporters…after a while insults cease to be forceful *qua* insults and it becomes a matter of wearing down the opposition through tedious bad faith responses.

The Wokal Distance response struck me as a particularly egregious misrepresentation—the screenshot left out the entire following section in which you explained *why* you ultimately read Rigney as attacking women rather than feminism. For someone to accuse you of conflating the terms “women” and “feminism,” they have to ignore the fact that you are doing the *totally unheard of* writerly thing of… [checks notes] …stating a thesis before you delve into defending the claim in detail. (I teach college writing. This is literally argument 101.)

In any event, I think you’re doing a service not only by the clarity of your engagement, but also in the way your engagement highlights the blustering, evasive responses of those trying to defend Rigney’s stance. People who have dealt with friends or family members who are chronically unable/unwilling to hear criticism (due to clinical narcissism, garden-variety fragility of ego, or other internal dysfunction) will recognize the deflection and attack tactics on display here.

As an aside, does Rigney anywhere in his book offer a consistent definition of “feminism”? At the risk of encouraging you to go even deeper down this rabbit hole, I think this might be another important area on which to shed the light of semantic clarity. The Moscow et al. crowd consistently use the term without defining it, something that post-1960s conservatives are broadly guilty of as well, and I think it’s become the right-wing equivalent of labeling someone a racist. It’s lobbed as a slur and used to silence anyone who is questioning a fashionable orthodoxy by putting them on the defensive.

Until very recently, I have done a lot of rhetorical and emotional work to carefully signal to my conservative peers that I’m “not a feminist” while I seek to improve the conversation around men, women, relationships, and gender difference in the church. However, I have come to realize that most Christians I know have only a vague notion of what “a feminist” is (or that it is not one monolithic thing) and therefore it has become an almost empty term that often means “person [usually woman] whose ideas about gender I find too progressive.”

All that being said, I’m curious how YOU define what you are distancing yourself from when you say “I’m not a feminist,” and whether you would agree that you do hold to ideas that were considered “feminist” in the past (such as women’s intellectual equality with men – cf. Mary Wollstonecraft) and therefore may find yourself a type of feminist simply by

"affirming the human female was designed by God to be equally capable of rationality, equally invested in preserving truth, equally concerned with guarding what is good — and, tragically, that these good design features in women were just as compromised by sin as they were in men" [side note: AMEN!]

I am very familiar with how reassuring people that one is “not a feminist” functions as a shibboleth in our circles, and I am not saying declaring oneself “a feminist” is the answer (it may cause more problems than it’s worth, and be a stumbling block to listeners). But I have come to question the wisdom of playing the boundaries game set up by people who use the term “feminism” in weaponized ways to serve the culture war. For too many people, this creates the conditions for the cognitive reflex reflected in this meme: https://imgflip.com/i/9qwbzu

On that note, I will end this long ramble. :)

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Ben Flack's avatar

My wife and I were talking about your follow-up here this morning (which is *chef's kiss* btw), and she made a fantastic point about how the thinking around empathy and women mirrors the thinking around sex and men, and in the end both serve to bolster patriarchy and misogyny.

The basic structure goes like this:

• [Empathy/strong sex drive] is part of how God made [women/men], and in its place [the home, mothering, etc./marriage] it's a good thing.

• Because of the fall, [women/men] are especially susceptible to sinning with their [empathy/sex drive].

• The solution to this susceptibility is [male leadership/female submission (E.G. sex on demand, or "modest" dress in public)].

• Who is most at fault when things go wrong? Well it's obviously [women for not submitting to male leadership/women for not putting out enough, or not being modest enough].

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