Talking language
Recently, Bookslut's Jessa Crispin said this while commenting on Suzanne Braun Levine's Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood:
The last ten years or so has seen in a rise in what I like to call the Special Olympics version of feminism. Nothing you do is bad or wrong, because it's all about finding the authentic version of you. (Thanks, Oprah.) Leave your husband and abandon your children in order to go have casual sex with a yoga instructor? Good for you, you're getting in touch with yourself as a sexual being. Give up sex entirely and tell everyone that (solo) flamenco dancing is all you need anymore? Good for you, you're rejecting society's pressure on women to be sexual beings. Quit your high paying job and become a stay at home mother? Good for you, you're doing the most important work in the world.
According to the City Journal, this version of feminism has taken over the brains of formerly influential and important feminist thinkers. As recently stated by Marjane Satrapi, "I don't know why people, when they become older, become stupider."
The Special Olympics of feminism. Taken with the Satrapi quote, my guess is Crispin means that the last decade of feminism has been a competition of stupid beliefs about what empowers women. Perhaps she's thinking it's a competition among "retarded" beliefs, which really isn't synonymous with "stupid."
Noting the examples Crispin says are about feminism (I'm not familiar with either of the books linked to at Amazon), I'd call it a competition of amusing political justifications women make for their lives. Crispin is snappier but crueler. No interpretation of her phrasing suggests anything but unkindness in her reference to developmentally disabled folks.
Not that the joke is original. Unfortunately, it's all too common. Kestrell at Blog of a Blind Bookworm noticed it too.
4 comments:
The "Special Olympics feminism" thing is contemptable, but I don't think she means it in the way you think she does. I think she's referring to the fact that all participants in the Special Olympics are deemed winners and get medals. She's saying it's a feminism in which celebrates women's right to make choices, including ones that Jessa Crispin doesn't approve of.
Speaking for myself, ill-advised celebrations of celebate tango dancing would rate pretty low on my issues with any contemporary social movement. But maybe that's just me.
It's a common misunderstanding that Special Olympics is only about the hugging, "everyone's a winner" events. They're way more than that for many of the participants. It's not clever banter, to use them in this kind of metaphor; it's lazy and misinformed.
Oh, and Satrapi's comment is flat-out ageist.
It's not clever banter, to use them in this kind of metaphor; it's lazy and misinformed.
That, and I do think it assumes there's something bad or pathetic about the Special Olympics. I mean, try that metaphor with a sporting event in which the athletes aren't widely seen as inferior to other people. "The World Cup of Feminism" or "the NHL Playoffs of Feminism" doesn't quite convey the same sort of disapproval.
"I do think it assumes there's something bad or pathetic about the Special Olympics."
Indeed. I met Crispin recently and liked her, though I was the only one in my class who did (she was a guest speaker). She comes across as . . . almost painfully ditzy and self-deprecating in person. It seems that she saves her bolder persona for her online writing.
But this . . . contemptable indeed.
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