White Feminism

There's absolutely no doubt in the world that different minorities face different struggles, and that certain minorities sometimes overlook the struggles other minorities.  This happens more often than it should in feminism, and it's called "white feminism".

White feminism is when one focuses on issues concerning well-off white women and fails to address oppression faced by women of color and other women without privilege.  A great example of this happened just last week.  Conservative talk show host Tomi Lahren, who is known for her less than kind words towards liberals, admitted to being pro-choice, and got suspended for a week, however, according to several news sites including New York Daily News, she may not return to the show despite the remaining six months on her contract.

At first, this sounds pretty great, right?  She thinks women should have the right to choose whether she wants to get an abortion and the government has no place in that decision.  So, she's not really as bad as people made her out to be, right? Not so fast.

Tomi has an extensive history of saying some controversial things that quite frankly are uninformed and borderline hate speech, such as when she tweeted the Black Lives Matter movement is the new KKK.  The tweet has since been deleted, but Daily Mail grabbed a screenshot while it was still out on the internet.

Photo courtesy of Daily Mail

However, after she told the world she's pro-choice on the talk show The View (her answer begins around 3:30), women all over the country flocked to praise her for holding such a feminist viewpoint.  Someone even wrote an article on The Odyssey Online apologizing to her for tearing her down.

This is the perfect example of white feminism.

People were willing to forgive Tomi and suddenly have a complete attitude change toward her because she said she's pro-choice.  They were willing to forget all of the racist rhetoric she's been spewing for months, and even the hateful comments she made about the Women's March a little over two months ago, calling them "snowflakes", saying they were crying and playing the victim card.

Photo courtesy of Tomi Lahren Twitter

Feminism that ignores the struggles of fellow minority sisters is not real feminism.  You can't claim to fight for women's rights unless you fight for ALL women's rights.  This is called "intersectional feminsim".

An article from USA Today reports "If feminism is advocating for women's rights and equality between the sexes, intersectional feminism is the understanding of how women's overlapping identities — including race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation — impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination."  According to the same article, intersectionality is a term first coined in 1989 by UCLA and Columbia Law professor  Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in her seminal paper on race theory.

The feminist movement is no stranger to discrimination; there is a long history of racial tension coupled with women's rights movements.  The National Public Radio analyzes this history.  In the article, Boston University historian Ashley Farmer says, "When we actually get down to representation or creating a list of demands or mobilizing around a set of ideas...it tends to be that white middle-class or upper-class women's priorities get put above the rest."

One particularly infamous movement involving white feminism is the suffragette movement in the early twentieth century.  Although she made great strides for women's suffrage, Susan B. Anthony was no friend to black people.  According to Wesleyan University, she said  “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman”, and, even worse than that, according to Women in World History Curriculum, she even said, "...The old anti slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last...."  Not exactly the kindest thing coming from someone who was supposedly all about equality.

Photo courtesy of Us Weekly

Intersectional feminism is important in modern day society, because without it, it's easy to ignore struggles faced by minorities within feminism, such as transgender bathroom laws or the fact that while white women are, on average, paid less than men, women of color are paid even less than white women.  Without intersectionality, feminism is not truly feminism.  There are only victories for the feminist movement when all women benefit.

What do you think?  Do you think that white feminism is dangerous in modern day society?  How might white feminism negatively affect other minorities?

The Bechdel Test

One thing that is really important to all minorities is representation in the media, which includes everything from books to television shows to movies.  Feminism is no exception to this.  It's extremely important for women to be portrayed as complex characters who are vastly different from one another.  In 1985, a little thing called the Bechdel Test came into existence, and it would challenge lack of representation for decades.

The idea that shaped the Bechdel Test is certainly nothing new.  In 1929, English author and modernist Virginia Woolf wrote an essay entitled "A Room of One's Own".  In this essay, Woolf observed the literature of her time, saying, "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that [...]"  Basically, she's saying that women in popular literature of the time are only represented as relatives and usually not mentioned unless they have a relationship to a man.

The Bechdel Test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip "Dykes To Watch Out For".  In a strip titled "The Rule", a woman explains to her friend her "rules" for which movies she watches.

"The Rule" from "Dykes To Watch Out For" by Alison Bechdel

These rules eventually came to be known as the Bechdel Test.  The rules are:
1. The movie has at least two women in it
2. The women talk to each other
3. They talk about something other than a man

The Bechdel test is also called the "Bechdel rule", "Bechdel's law", the "No Movie Measure", or even the "Bechdel-Wallace test", which acknowledges Liz Wallace, who was an inspiration for the comic strip.  An article by Dr. K. Faith Lawrence suggests that there is an extension of the rule: the two women must have names and are not just referred to by their description or job title in the credits.  In a YouTube video posted to her blog "Feminist Frequency", Anita Sarkeesian applies the Bechdel Test to the 2011 Oscar nominees for Best Picture, and proposes that an addendum that women must talk for more than 60 seconds be applied.  She argues that if women only exchange a few lines, it's kind of difficult to make the claim that the film features women of depth and character.  Even with this new rule, the bar is still set pretty low for women's representation in films.

The Bechdel Test does not judge the quality of a film.  As Sarkseesian later mentioned in her video, "This test does not gauge the quality of a film.  It doesn't determine whether a film is feminist or not, and it doesn't even determine whether a film is woman centered."  She talks about the film True Grit, which follows the adventures of Mattie Ross struggling to get by in a man's world, and how even though this film is woman-centered, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, because the female lead never talks to another woman except for an innkeeper, which doesn't total 60 seconds.

A surprising number of movies, some of which feature great female characters, don't pass the Bechdel Test.  According to Film School Rejects, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II actually doesn't pass the test.  It goes without saying that the Harry Potter series features several strong female characters: Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley (maybe not so much in the films), Luna Lovegood, Molly Weasley, and even Professor McGonagall.  However, none of the female characters actually talk to each other.  Aside from a few comments between two female characters to one another, such as McGonagall to Molly Weasley when she "always wanted to use that spell", none of the women in the movie talk to each other.

A 2014 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shows that in 120 films made worldwide from 2010 to 2013, only 31% of named characters were female, and 23% of the films had a female protagonist or co-protagonist, and only 7% of directors were women.  Even though the Bechdel Test is over 30 years old, it still seems like a few filmmakers could do with a lesson on representation in media.

So, what do you think?  Although it is somewhat flawed, is the Bechdel Test a good basic way to measure representation in movies?  Does it have a place in modern society?