Zoe Williams: Feminism without human warmth leaves me cold
.... the Slumflower’s
message – love yourself, and that is your suit of armour – was much more
important and universal than relationship advice, and spoke powerfully to girls
who were ages away from their first shitty boyfriend, as well as enlighteningly
to women who were ages from being able to remember him.
Eggerue did a TED talk
and guest-edited the Today programme. She has a quarter of a million Instagram
followers, and is plainly a force for inspiration. But fast-forward to now, the
message has changed. Like a mash-up of Naomi Wolf and early-era Beyoncé, she
has taken a female self-sufficiency narrative and spliced it with a coquettish
1950s individualism, to create something appalling, in my view a creed of
exploitation. Initially I thought someone had hacked her Twitter feed: “If he
says he loves you, and you are still paying your own bills, you settled for a
roommate.” It got uglier: “Men shouldn’t open their useless mouths to invite me
anywhere if they are not arranging my (luxe) travel and covering my Michelin
star meal, plus some money (£1k) in a brown envelope to thank me for donating
my time to them that I could have spent at home relaxing.”
A new voice of
feminism, in short, had turned into something I found anti-feminist,
anti-humanist, anti-intimacy, anti-everything I care about. The idea that you
can address the objectification of women by abasing men – you want to measure
us by the pound? Make sure you can afford to – is a race to the bottom. It goes
against every element of the feminism I understand, in which women aspire not
to be kept by men, but to have agency and self-determination and the ability to
keep themselves. Women don’t
present their sexuality as a commodity that only the rich man deserves, because
they have sexual destinies of their own, which cannot be bought or sold, can
only be realised or thwarted. Above all, my feminism doesn’t even exist without
the presumption that all human beings are infinitely precious, infinitely
vulnerable, that none of us could withstand the harshness of this worldview, in
which we all use each other furiously until everybody’s spent... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/12/feminism-human-warmth-slumflower
