Legendary Norwegian Marathoner, Grete Waitz, dies far too young at age 57

 

photograph of athlete Grete Waitz (1 October 1953 – 19 April 2011), is from here

What follows if from the New York Times. Please click on the title below, for more links to past NYT articles on Grete Waitz's athletic career. I have watched Grete compete in marathons for many years. My condolences to her loved ones.

Grete Waitz, Marathon Champion, Dies at 57

By LIZ ROBBINS and BRUCE WEBER

Published: April 19, 2011

Grete Waitz, the Norwegian schoolteacher who won more New York City Marathons — nine — than anyone else, and whose humility and athleticism made her a singularly graceful champion and a role model for young runners, especially women, died Tuesday in Oslo. She was 57.

Associated Press

Grete Waitz crossing the finish line of the New York Marathon in 1983.

Her death was confirmed by Helle Aanesen, the manager of Aktiv Mot Kreft (Active Against Cancer), the foundation Waitz founded in 2007. In 2005, Waitz had received a diagnosis of cancer, though she never publicly revealed what kind. She lived in Oslo, and she and her husband, Jack, also had a home in Gainesville, Fla. 

In 1991, Runner’s World magazine named Waitz the female runner of the quarter-century, and she was perhaps the pre-eminent female distance runner in history. She twice set the world record at 3,000 meters, and she set world records at distances of 8 kilometers, 10 kilometers, 15 kilometers and 10 miles.

But it was in the marathon, that 26.2-mile symbol of human endurance, that Waitz most distinguished herself, setting a world record of 2 hours 32 minutes 30 seconds the first time she ran one, in New York in 1978, and subsequently lowering the world standard three more times. In addition to her New York City victories, Waitz won the London Marathon twice, the Stockholm Marathon once and the world championship marathon in 1983.

“She is our sport’s towering legend,” said Mary Wittenberg, the president of the New York Road Runners. “I believe not only in New York, but around the world, marathoning is what it is today because of Grete. She was the first big time female track runner to step up to the marathon and change the whole sport.”

Grete Waitz (whose name was pronounced GREH-tuh VITES) was not simply a champion, however; she was also something of a pioneer. At the time of her first New York victory, women’s distance running was a novelty. Just 938 out of 8,937 entrants in the 1978 New York marathon were women — in 2010, 16,253 of 45,350 entrants were — and the women’s marathon would not be added to the Olympics until the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, where Waitz finished second to Joan Benoit Samuelson.

“I lost a mentor and a role model,” Samuelson, 53, said Tuesday, a day after running the Boston Marathon in 2:51:29. She decided to run at the last minute, Samuelson said, because, although she had been battling back problems, she was inspired by Waitz’s courage.

“What will endure forever is that she was able to balance a competitive career with the most gracious lifestyle, and a character that emanated good will,” Samuelson said.

Remarkably, Waitz, a champion track runner, ran her first marathon as a lark, with the encouragement of her husband, who was also her coach, and who told her that a trip to New York would be like a second honeymoon for them. Even in training she had never run more than 13 miles, and the science of the sport was young enough that her dinner the night before the race included shrimp cocktail and filet mignon, hardly the load of carbohydrates that even today’s rankest amateurs know to consume. As she recalled in later interviews, the last 10 miles of the race were agony, and she was so angry at her husband that when she crossed the finish line, she tore off her shoes and flung them at him.

“I’ll never do this stupid thing again,” she yelled.

She was, however, hooked. The next year, she finished the race in 2:27:33, beating her record by almost five minutes and becoming the first woman to officially run a marathon faster than two and a half hours. Her legendary status was assured.

In her home country, her New York victories conferred on her the status of a national hero; a statue of her stands outside Bislett Stadium, an international sports arena in Oslo, and her likeness appeared on a Norwegian postage stamp. She established a 5-kilometer race in Oslo that eventually expanded to 40,000 runners, and in 2007, she started her foundation, which sponsors runners in major races and supports cancer hospitals and patient centers.

“I am convinced you can go through a lot more when you are physically fit,” Waitz said to explain her foundation’s philosophy. “It is both physical and mental. With the athletic background, you think more on the positive side — you can do this.”

Multimedia

Slide Show

Grete Waitz: 1953-2011

But she was also lionized in this country, and especially in New York, and the image of her on the road — a quick, efficient stride, her pigtails slicing back and forth like metronomic windshield wipers — became familiar.

She won her victories as the popularity of the New York marathon itself surged, and she became a celebrity in the city. Cabdrivers and the homeless called her by her first name, and over the years, she and her husband made appearances not only at the marathon but also at other New York events, including Grete’s Great Gallop, a half-marathon run each October as part of a Norwegian festival.

Working with the New York Road Runners Foundation, she frequently spoke to the city’s schoolchildren, and she often appeared on behalf of Fred’s Team, the cancer charity started by her friend Fred Lebow, the founder of the New York marathon, who died of the disease in 1994.

“Every sport should have a true champion like Grete, a woman with such dignity and humanity and modesty,” said George Hirsch, the chairman of the New York Road Runners. “She symbolized what was so great about the community of marathoners.”

Grete Andersen was born in Oslo on Oct. 1, 1953. Her father, John, was a pharmacist; her mother, Reidun, worked in a grocery store. From an early age, she would run with her two older brothers, Jan and Arild, in a nearby forest and later at a local track club. She met Jack Waitz, a local track coach and an accountant for a newspaper, through mutual friends.

She is survived by her brothers and her husband.

Waitz was in her mid-20s, a geography teacher in the Oslo schools and the oldest woman on the Norwegian national track team when the invitation to participate in the marathon came from Lebow. She had, in fact, been planning to retire from running after the 1978 track season to concentrate on teaching. But Lebow, who knew of her accomplishments, was a savvy judge of running talent, and he and her husband believed she had longer distances in her. At the very least, Lebow thought, Waitz would be an excellent pacesetter.

She outdid his expectations, of course, and they became fast friends and the co-authors of one of running’s most memorable episodes. She had already run her last New York City Marathon as a competitor in 1990, when she finished fourth, but in 1992, while Lebow’s brain cancer was in remission, Waitz and Lebow ran his race together. Their time was 5:32:35, an agonizingly long, slow pace for Waitz, who was used to running more than twice as fast.

“It was an incredibly emotional day for both of us,” Waitz later said. “He gave me the strength to run, but it was very hard to run so slowly with him for more than five hours.”

They finished with their hands clasped and raised over their heads. She would always call it her 10th victory in New York.

“I always say she’s the queen of the road,” Lebow said about Waitz before the race. “But she doesn’t behave like a monarch.”

Lynn Zinser contributed reporting.

"Objectification is Worse for Men", and other loads of CRAP. A public response to Andre, Alexei, Lawrence, and Dave

image was found here

What follows is from the comments section of a post from Sociological Images *here*, showing many examples of how nude men are being displayed in advertising. My comments are a response to that collection as well as to men's ridiculous patriarchy-denying and CRAP-ignorant comments below.

With thanks to JPLee for her responses to Alexei and Lawrence.

Julian's note:
Dave is demonstrating how incredibly privileged and clueless he is. His rant is not worthy of much of a response. Anyone who believes "nobody cares about men" has no grasp of reality. Which gender is wiping the asses of baby boys, then? And which gender is feeding and taking emotional care, physical care, and often economic care of males of all ages? Men's logical phallusy appears to know no bounds. But we already knew that, didn't we?

Yale University: a VERY Pro-Rape and Pro-Rapist Campus (not unlike most rich colleges that allow het whiteboys in): spread the word

when you think "gang of rapists" think about photos like this one, from here

What follows is a snippet of an article from AlterNet. The rest of the article follows my response to the excerpt. Click on the title below to link back.

Several of the incidents leading to the investigation against Yale University have become notorious: frat members chanting “no means yes! yes means anal!” and worse outside the Yale Women’s Center. Members of yet another frat standing outside the same center with signs that read “we love Yale sluts.” Emails that ranked incoming freshman women with identifying information (including their residences on campus), based on "how many beers it would take to have sex with them.” And then there was the repeated theft of students’ “Take Back the Night” art projects, decorated t-shirts detailing personal stories of sexual assault.

It’s a horrifying pastiche--no less so because these students are allegedly the cream of the crop, perhaps future presidents among them.

Do they mean like the great male supremacist sexual exploiter John F. Kennedy, or the pro-pornography, pro-sexual assault, and pro-sexual harassment president, Bill Clinton? Which U.S. white het male presidents have not used their power to abuse women? Do we know the answer to that? Are any men, themselves, be able to tell us the truth of their own behavior? Or do those with the most privilege (like the Duke white het guys) simply hire attorneys to keep them out of prison or settle out of court, with "gag orders" on anyone who would speak the truth against them? Remember: Wealthy, "educated" WHM are the most dangerous gang of rapists and thieves on Earth. Don't let the college degrees fool ya. The college degrees are what help get their foot in the door, but it's "who they know" that often gets them the high-paying jobs.

And, regarding the title, virulently white het male supremacist and terroristically rapist behavior is what they mean by "bad"--they don't mean "bad" in a "good" way--even while the wealthy WHM do. The young men are misogynist terrorists, nothing less. When will the media--any media--call rapists "male supremacist" and "terrorists"? Can the Western media never ever us those terms to describe WHM--especially Christian ones? It appears not.

More analysis of the AlterNet piece and CRAP-loaded society closes this post.

AlterNet / By Sarah Seltzer

Recent Yale Male Behavior So Sexist the Federal Government Has to Intervene

The investigation of Yale shows the government may actually be taking sexual assault on campus seriously.

April 15, 2011 |

Bad behavior by men on campus, date rape not taken seriously, backlash against victims who speak out: none of the elements of the Title IX case against Yale are new. What is refreshing, however, is that the issue may actually be taken seriously by none less than the federal government.

Several of the incidents leading to the investigation against Yale University have become notorious: frat members chanting “no means yes! yes means anal!” and worse outside the Yale Women’s Center. Members of yet another frat standing outside the same center with signs that read “we love Yale sluts.” Emails that ranked incoming freshman women with identifying information (including their residences on campus), based on "how many beers it would take to have sex with them.” And then there was the repeated theft of students’ “Take Back the Night” art projects, decorated t-shirts detailing personal stories of sexual assault.

It’s a horrifying pastiche--no less so because these students are allegedly the cream of the crop, perhaps future presidents among them. But the most worrisome stories leading to Title IX investigations and similar controversies on other campuses (and the reason these incidents are more serious in context) are the tales we haven’t heard, the stories of the unnamed victims of campus sexual assaults who felt that the very university structures ostensibly designed to help them in their moment of need did the exact opposite--instead valuing the school’s reputation and the desire to avoid conflict. And beyond these stories are dozens of others, students who were assaulted and didn’t even bother reporting the crime because of the (often correct) perception that it wouldn’t do them any good.

It’s the combination of incidents, public and private alike, that led the 16 complainants who filed suit to label Yale a “hostile environment,” one in violation of Title IX’s provisions ensuring a level educational playing field for women. As with all such accusers, these students faced backlash on campus, claims that they were going too far and polarizing their community. But while their peers may doubt them, the government is paying attention.

In timing that may or may not be coincidental to the public acknowledgement of the Yale investigation, the Office of Civil Rights in combination with the Department of Education and the Obama administration has just launched a major new push to get universities to comply with federal guidelines for handling sexual assault-- beginning with a kickoff speech from Vice-President Joe Biden, who used the phrase “rape is rape” to seemingly signal displeasure with the wishy-washy way some schools handle the issue. The OCR released a an advisory reminding schools in receipt of federal funding that tolerating sexual harassment is a violation of Title IX--the law's equal-opportunity guarantee for education.

Obviously, universities have unique situations. They're not empowered in the same way law enforcement is and they have their own obligations to fact-finding, to students' privacy and freedom of expression and to maintaining harmony in the community--and some of these systems for internal investigations may well have been intended to encourage victims to come forward. But regardless of intentions, it's not working. As the Center for Public Integrity found last year in a must-read report, many victims of campus rapes actually feel it's useless to come forward. And unfortunately, that feeling of futility is engendered all too often by their school's policies.

A Widespread Problem

The incidents on Yale’s storied gothic campus are getting the most press--probably a combination of the public nature of the incidents and the reputation of the school. But the problems underlying those boorish acts of intimidation aren’t unique to Yale. In fact, the Yale investigation is one of several Title IX investigations pending by OCR, including one at Harvard Law School, the president’s alma mater. Figures from a 2007 Justice Department study indicate that 1 in 5 women will be raped in college, many of whom will never report the crime--1 in 15 of their male peers will also be raped. As we’ve explored at AlterNet, rape and the exploding problem of depression on campus are intimately linked. And the cultural and institutional plagues of shame, turning a blind eye, confusion and secrecy around rape, it should also be noted, can lead to the proportionally smaller, but nonetheless real problem of false rape accusations as well.

In an interview with AlterNet, Attorney Wendy Murphy, who has pioneered the use of Title IX to get schools to address sexual assault procedures (and who filed the Harvard suit), explained why flaws in university policies erect barriers to equality.

One widespread issue, addressed in the new OCR Advisory, is schools’ demanding undue evidence to adjudicate sexual assault cases, asking that victims adhere to a “clear and convincing evidence” standard (which Murphy estimates as 90 percent proof) rather than the “preponderance of evidence” standard (51 percent). Yale’s language, says Murphy, used a confusing hybrid of the two, “clear preponderance.” Crucially, OCR’s new advisory specifically demands the preponderance language, telling schools that have used the more exclusionary standards that they’ve been in violation of students’ rights.

As to why it's important to have that standard, Murphy says universities never put that kind of massive burden of proof on victims of racial harassment, or harassment aimed at GBLT or disabled students--and that sexual harassment and rape should not have a “special set of rules” but be treated as targeted violence. It’s also simply a fact that in situations like date rape, it’s almost impossible to reach that higher standard of proof. While schools should be invested in finding out the truth of all incidents, they should also encourage victims to come forward, even if there's no "corroborating" evidence.

A second problem Murphy identifies is universities' “running out the clock” by waiting to rule on sexual assault and harassment claims until the completion of a police investigation (which often results in no charges being filed). At this point one or both students may be close to graduation and the university absolved of its legal responsibility. And the student who has suffered during that period has lost “education, emotional comfort, equal treatment... you can never give that back,” she says. “It does irremediable harm to run out the clock.”

These types of de facto or official policies are among many that make it hard for young people to deal with the sexual environment on campus. The Center for Public Integrity released a damning nationwide report last year that found fault (and law-skirting) on many campuses, in nearly every aspect of rape prevention and assault programs.

And just last month, Dickinson students participated in a three-day sit-in demanding specific changes to their school’s sexual assault policy; they won a sweeping overhaul and many of the protesters are sitting on the committee charged with implementing changes.

A Predictable Backlash

Meanwhile, a predictable backlash flourishes on Yale’s campus, with some students complaining about the radical feminists who have hijacked their elite institution’s good name--because they’ve personally never felt any hostility. The complainants who have gone public will continue to see their names dragged through the mud in the comments sections of student papers and many bystanders will ask, “Why, literally, make a 'federal case'? Why not just more education and resources to change this campus environment?”

Claire Gordon, a former Yale student who worked at the Women’s Center during one of the harassment incidents, has a rundown of the toxic culture at Yale, and she explains why a lawsuit may have been imperative and resources weren't enough:

“This task force comes in a long line of committees and councils at Yale responsible for investigating, examining, reviewing, and recommending on the subject of sexual misconduct. It's a headache just trying to trace them all....Without actually punishing the harassers, without calling it sexual harassment, without addressing the culture that has made so many men "lapse in judgment" so many times over so many years, the school has allowed this culture to persist.”

A place like the Yale Women’s Center is already there to provide the kind of education and safe environment that critics of the OCR investigation posit as an alternative--but when women seeking that “safe space” are repeatedly accosted by groups of men chanting pro-rape obscenities, clearly, the message is not getting through. Clearly, education is not enough.

Sometimes, it takes the full force of the law to make a big university pay attention.

A Last Resort

Backlash aside, Yale is already making promises to change its disciplinary system for sexual assault cases. Why? The fact that it's under investigation will most likely push the school to bring its policies into compliance. As the AP reports: “The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights confirmed Friday that it has begun investigating the school. The office gets about 7,000 complaints per year and investigates about one-third of them.” In essence, the OCR investigation itself is the punishment that will force Yale’s hand. And for the students who filed the complaint, it was a last resort, a move only arrived at after what they say were futile efforts to use internal university channels.

Title IX is the law that guarantees equal access to educational opportunities, regardless of gender. Traditionally, it's thought of as a sports-equality statute but it applies to sexual harassment as well--and this month the Obama administration has made it abundantly clear that it's taking this aspect of its application seriously. Another of the OCR's new recommendations is that schools inform students in advance of their rights under Title IX, so that if they do face an unhelpful or unequal disciplinary system, they will be aware that those rights are being violated. This recommendation is also a great way to challenge "rape culture" on campus--to let students of all gender orientations know that the law--and justice--is on their side from the very beginning.

The fact that so many investigations are or have been pending at the OCR, and its new findings, are evidence of a small but important culture shift emanating from DC. And the fact that the media, from Good Morning America to the New York Times have been reporting the Yale story in a manner somewhat more sympathetic to affected women on campus (even using the word “misogyny!”) is heartening too.

Challenging rape culture, and university guidelines combatting it, can't be a simple process and each campus could probably use dozens of experts at every level from prevention to discipline to counseling. Not every victim will want the same procedure, not every situation will merit a cookie-cutter response. But schools' taking the issue seriously and signaling that's it's no joke will help all students, male, female and LGBT, navigate the deeply fraught environment of sexual culture on campus.

While we have a long way to go on this issue, and there’s no guarantee colleges and universities will comply with the new guidelines, it’s important to note that not even Yale and Harvard are being allowed to buck the rules. That feels like some kind of victory.


Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet, a staff writer at RH Reality Check and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published in Jezebel.com and on the websites of the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. Find her at sarahmseltzer.com.

What follows was written upon further reflection of the above, as well as after receiving this comment from UK activist, Jennifer Drew:

JENNIFER DREW said...

I wonder how many years it has taken for the Office of Civil Rights in combination with the Department of Education to step in and begin the very hard task of forcing these misogynistic white male supremacist universities to comply with Title IX. Female students at both Yale and Harvard continue to be forced to endure a hostile women-hating environment because too many of these over-privileged white men believe women students are men's disposable sexual service stations. I note too that three times as many women students are raped by males as male students are raped by other males. What does that say about a hostile and women-hating environment? At long last some malestream media are naming this widespread male violence as misogynistic and that dreaded phrase 'sexual harassment' is actually being used to define precisely what these women students are enduring from these male terrorists masquerading as students. I sincerely hope Yale and Harvard are forced to comply but I know too often 'words not deeds' are perceived as sufficient. Not good enough - deeds not words is what is required.

Hi Jennifer,

It has likely taken the Office of Civil Rights and the Dept. of Ed. as many years to step in as they have been in existence, unless they pre-exist Yale. This is clearly not the case with the Office of Civil Rights. Civil Rights law is a flimsily tacked on addendum in the U.S., not at all foundational to the Constitution as written originally--which only ever intended to guarantee some forms of equality among white presumably het men.

A problem I have with the article is the blatant classism that reeks in a statement like this one:

"It’s a horrifying pastiche--no less so because these students are allegedly the cream of the crop, perhaps future presidents among them."

The word "allegedly" aside, to me, the inference is that it is no more horrifying when we find out a poor, academically uneducated population is misogynistically hostile to women. As if to say, "What do we expect of those uneducated people?" What is too often expected of grossly over-privileged males is everything that amounts to being entitled and statused--including being president.

Would anyone in the U.S. liberal to progressive media write the following and not get a sense that something is irresponsible and oppressive about it?

"It’s a horrifying pastiche--no more so because these young men are allegedly the bottom of the barrel, perhaps future welfare recipients or prison residents among them."

Hostile "higher" learning and living environments like Yale's campus are commonplace; they are the reigning rule not the disgraceful exception. It is because of the liberal-patriarchal education males get there that this remains the case; it is not despite the education that males behave this way, in other words. The organisation and institutionalisation of misogynistic, rapist environments on campuses such as Yales, in fraternities, or around campus, in private dormitories, as well as in the arrogantly white male supremacist hallways and classroom environs, ensure that women will be raped and harassed there.

To actually put forth the belief that this is, effectively, more not LESS shocking because wealthier, white, over-privileged het males are doing it is to insult, degrade, terrorise, and subordinate everyone else and perpetuate a truly dangerous idea: that rich white het males are less dangerous than any other classed, raced, sexuality-identified and gendered demographic, when, in fact, given structural/institutional power, they are more dangerous: the most dangerous.

The article's other reference to classism is the use of the rarely-used term "boorish".

The earlier-noted phrasing and this particular word choice-making, particularly when resurrected in discussions of what happens at classist, elitist universities, rubs more than salt into pro-rich/anti-poor wounds of most non-wealthy, less privileged people on Earth, with echos of the severe on-going classism of British society that, in the U.S. especially, is effectively fused to white supremacist racism. Here's the meaning:

Original meaning was "peasant farmer" (cf. Ger. Bauer, Du. boer, Dan. bonde), and in English it was at first applied to agricultural laborers in or from other lands, as opposed to the native yeoman; negative connotation first attested 1560s (in boorish), from notion of clownish rustics. Related: Boorishness. [source: *here*]

As for this from your comment:

I note too that three times as many women students are raped by males as male students are raped by other males. What does that say about a hostile and women-hating environment?

It brings to mind Dworkin's rarely discussed analysis of the social-political function of homophobia among men--to keep men's learned sexual aggression directed at women. From her 24 Hour Truce speech to allegedly anti-sexist men:

Homophobia is very important: it is very important to the way male supremacy works. In my opinion, the prohibitions against male homosexuality exist in order to protect male power. Do it to her. That is to say: as long as men rape, it is very important that men be directed to rape women. As long as sex is full of hostility and expresses both power over and contempt for the other person, it is very important that men not be declassed, stigmatized as female, used similarly. The power of men as a class depends on keeping men sexually inviolate and women sexually used by men. Homophobia helps maintain that class power: it also helps keep you as individuals safe from each other, safe from rape. If you want to do something about homophobia, you are going to have to do something about the fact that men rape, and that forced sex is not incidental to male sexuality but is in practice paradigmatic. [source: *here*]

Next up, this, from the AlterNet article:

"As to why it's important to have that standard, Murphy says universities never put that kind of massive burden of proof on victims of racial harassment, or harassment aimed at GBLT or disabled students--and that sexual harassment and rape should not have a “special set of rules” but be treated as targeted violence. It’s also simply a fact that in situations like date rape, it’s almost impossible to reach that higher standard of proof. While schools should be invested in finding out the truth of all incidents, they should also encourage victims to come forward, even if there's no "corroborating" evidence."

First, can the L-for-Lesbian slip any farther from it's brief first place position? (Only in the line-up of letters, never in social reality.) Since when did the only woman-only group in the Queer alphabet acronym, get moved to the third position? I object. I object more to the fact that radical lesbian feminists are increasingly relegated to the last or non-existent position in queer communities across the U.S.

Second, states and other governing bodies have demonstrated they WILL NOT recognise rape as a Hate Crime because there would be too many cases for underpaid, overworked staffers to handle. If that's not a definition of CRAP-loaded, pro-terrorism "irony" I don't know what is.

Third, we must conclude there is no standard of proof for rape in a misogynist society which requires and defends rapists. Whether the rapist is a boyfriend, husband, co-worker, classmate, procurer, or pimp, the WHM supremacist criminal and court systems are stacked, always, in favor of men who abuse women and/or children--especially girl children.

A feminist woman I knew who attended Yale in the 1960s almost had to drop out because of the viciousness of the patriarchal attitudes and lessons taught to her in the classroom, not outside of it. Due to the increasingly pro-pornography/prostitution (read: woman-hating) climate in liberal white environs, what we find is that non-academically educated people are clearer about what's harmful about the wealthier side of white male supremacy than are privileged college students who are too invested in it--sexually, economically, interpersonally, and institutionally--to object.

What the over-privileged het-males-on-campus are doing is completely normal, predictable, and traditional non-Indigenist het male behavior. Period. And if that seems like an anti-FirstWorldhetman thing to say, I'd like the critics of my wording to go speak to any and all males who are in those overtly pro-rapist het male Ivy League frat houses and seminar classrooms and ask them how "abnormal" they believe their "falsely accused brothers" are.

What do The F Word, 60 Minutes, Piers Morgan, and A. C. Grayling have in common? (Clue: the silencing of radical feminist women of color)

image of Audre Lorde is from here

photo of Angela Davis is from here

image/photo of Marimba Ani is from here

photo of Yanar Mohammed is from here

photo of Vandana Shiva is from here

photo of Andrea Smith is from here

I often blog about things that come before me, sometimes because I seek out various bits of news or media, and sometimes because news comes to me. This post is a process of combining the two.

I received a link to a podcast of a program called The F Word (F is for Feminist), the program title of which asked this question: "Where have all the radicals gone?" The program features audio of a speech and interviews with Andrea Dworkin and Sheila Jeffreys. (Link provided below.) My immediate response is that the radical feminists are all over the Earth, particularly but not only in Asia. My question back to the producers of The F Word is this: are whites willing to listen to and interview radical feminist women of color who aren't from white-majority countries? (If it's an expense issue, there's always Skype.)

In his assessment of "feminism", A. C. Grayling does some really fucked up things. Read all about that *here* if you wish. But one of the things he does is assume feminism is all-white, and that women who are not white could benefit from the "advanced" ideas of white US and UK feminists.

I've also just recently seen a segment on 60 Minutes on rape. (For more on that, please see *here*.) The focus was a story about a college campus rape, of one woman by three men. The woman is white. The three men are Black. Also seen recently was an episode of a show I thought I'd stop watching week 1: Piers Morgan Tonight. On the program I saw, his guests were Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. They were there to discuss their "Real Men Don't Buy Women" campaign. (You can read more about that campaign *here*, at Huffington Post.) The problem with the campaign is that it puts mostly white het men front and center, pretending white men know a goddamned thing about ending rape or trafficking. Why not put the faces and voices of women of color who fight against rape and trafficking on the campaign cover, and also promote their work and perspectives on the atrocities? Because it isn't and won't be whites who solve the problem of trafficking. It will be women and girls of color around the world. It already is.

What all of these stories have in common are racist themes. Here's a list of the dangerously racist-misogynist themes.

--Feminism, especially radical feminism, is allegedly something only white women created and something that only white women can share with the world, for the betterment of the world, which is comprised of women of color, in the majority. This appears to be the viewpoint presented on a podcast of The F Word, as well as by A. C. Grayling in his 2009 book, Ideas That Matter.

--Black men, according to this 60 Minutes report, rape white women. Black men, according to 60 Minutes, don't rape Black women. And when rape happens, feminists of color are rarely to never invited in front of the US camera to explain the sexual (and racial) politics of rape and how media does and doesn't report on it as an act of terrorism by het men against women and girls, usually within an ethnic group, with the exception of class-privileged white het men, who, disproportionately, go out of their way travel all around the world to rape women and girls of all regions and colors.

--When US and UK white het men rape girls and women, the racial, regional, and national identities of the men are often not explicitly revealed. And when Black men assault white women, you can be damn sure the white male media will identify the rapists by race, to perpetuate the myth that the group white women have to fear most is Black men. And that's a giant load of C.R.A.P. Class privileged white het Christian men, specifically, are the most dangerous, predatory, serial raping men on Earth.

--White het men (from Hollywood and music celebrities to Bill Gates) are (allegedly) heroes, good guys, and can lead us all to be better people and make the world a better place.

They can't. Why? Because they and Bill Gates aren't doing anything substantive, radical, or revolutionary to stop C.R.A.P. His agenda and other Big White Men's humanitarian work (like that of Bono and Sting) is to educate poor children and end diseases in the Third World so they can become part of globalised Western/Global North systems of C.R.A.P. too, ultimately making other white men a lot more money. That view is a bit cynical. I'd feel less cynical if Bill Gates, Bono, and Sting, gave their money to organisations like RAWA, MADRE, The Audre Lorde Project, and groups of women working to end corporate capitalism which "bottom line" is white patriarchy in white sheep's clothing.

If famous WHM explicitly spoke out against patriarchal or male supremacist atrocities against girls and women, in those terms, and white supremacist atrocities too, that'd be helpful to the cause of composting C.R.A.P.

Instead, we'll get platitudes on the importance of ending poverty, illiteracy, disease, and famine, never bothering to notice how wealthy white men from Europe and the US profit, as a distinct demographic and economic class, from any effort that doesn't directly take power out of white het men's hands, individually, structurally, institutionally, and systematically, and redistribute that power into the hands of women of all colors, individually, structurally, institutionally, and systematically.

Taken together, these and hundreds of other media stories promoted by conservative, liberal, progressive, commercial mainstream media, and independent media, all tell a more-or-less single story in which women of color are not central figures in feminism, do not construct and build the foundational ideas found in feminist philosophy and activism, including in what is termed "radical feminism" philosophy and activism, and are not understood to be or promoted as role models, heroes, and leaders.

For years I have seen how these themes and memes impact women of color who are doing radical feminist work--some of whom use and embrace that term, some of whom do not. It means they are invalidated, unacknowledged, and invisibilised--silenced and erased--by white media. When this is done consistently enough, it appears to be "fact" and "reality" that feminists, especially radical feminists, are only white.

And it can appear that white women have to fear rape from Black het men, not from white het men or, more simply, "het men". And it can appear that women of color are not raped at all, or that when girls and women of color are raped, it doesn't matter to the media, which then communicates that it isn't important to the media-consuming public, which also communicates to raped girls and women that the assaults against them--sexual, social, and economic--don't matter.

I think all of this is very dangerous. I'm advocating that programs  like The F Word, Piers Morgan, 60 Minutes, and people like A. C. Grayling promote as central to feminism, the ideas and contributions--in philosophy, in society, in activism--of women of color, particularly and especially Black, Brown, Latina, Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab Muslim, and Indigenous women. I'm recommending that such programs and individuals, with far more public clout and political power in the mainstream world that any woman of color--even Oprah Winfrey--recognise who really is leading us out of hell-on-Earth. The people who are doing so, in the majority, are generally not white and are especially not male.

Women from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and from Indigenous populations globally, are responsible for the most revolutionary, radical, and complex perspectives and political campaigns to resist and rebel against patriarchy in all it's many regional and globalised forms. Why don't whites know this?

I leave it to you to answer that question. And, please do listen to this podcast, to get more of a sense of what I'm referring to. And, please take the words and perspectives of Andrea Dworkin and Sheila Jeffreys seriously. Andrea was and Sheila still is one of many important radical feminist writer-activists, most of whom are not white. For more discussion of the important work of radical feminist women of all regions and races, please see the post I did recently on A. C. Grayling, linked to above and again *here*. I will add that I do not believe whites can adequately comprehend the complexities and issues facing women of color globally. And that every region, the women of that region are the experts on their lives, and know best how to resist the forces, including the force of patriarchal white supremacy and misogynistic racism, in their organised efforts to survive and thrive. See the work of RAWA and MADRE for more.

What "radical" too often means when whites speak or write of it, when it is paired up with the term "feminist" is 'dealing explicitly with sexuality as men understand it'. This is but one area of central focus in radical feminism, globally. There are others. And if all your work centers only the writings and activism of whites who only write about male sexuality as it is acted upon the world terroristically and gynocidally, it is likely you'll never come to understand, appreciate, or support the work of most of the world's women, who have far more to contend with and survive than men's understanding and practice of sexuality, or white queer people's understanding and practice of transsexuality. I wish there was more coalition work among women across region. But men sure do fuck up most attempts at that.

I'll add that most of the whites I see online using and identifying themselves as "radical" do not appear to be radical to me. Their analyses and visions do not, usually or responsibly, center the experiences, struggles, and solutions put forth by women of color globally. Sometimes lip service is paid to women of color. Usually women of color are condescended to, marginalised, or ignored in white spaces, in my experience.

I'll leave you today with this: many women who do not identify as radical or as feminist, are the some of the women I most look to as exemplars and proponents of radical feminist revolutionary theory and practice.

All that follows is from The F Word. I want to thank Sheila Jeffreys for her critically important work. And, as you ought to know, I adore Andrea Dworkin. Enjoy the show.

The F Word

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Where have all the radicals gone? When feminism gets moderate

By Meghan Murphy

| April 15, 2011

•  

• Artist: Meghan Murphy
• Title: Where have all the Radicals gone? When feminism gets moderate.
• Genre: Current Affairs
• Year: 2011
• Length: 97:58 minutes (89.69 MB)
• Format: Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

Show Notes:

In a world where feminism as a whole is often touted as a bad word, radical feminism in particular is marginalized, not only by the mainstream media, but often within third-wave feminist discourse. Are we afraid to be 'too' radical at the risk of alienating the masses? Or is radical feminism simply misunderstood?

This radio documentary asks: Where have all the radicals gone? Has feminism been swept up in the neoliberal current? Have we de-radicalized in order to be more palatable to the masses? In the face of strippercize, Sarah Palin, and 'post-feminism,' is feminism in need of a re-radicalization?

Featuring an interview with renowned feminist scholar, Sheila Jeffreys, your host Meghan Murphy explores all these questions and more.

Veering quite a bit in format from The F Word's regular programming, this extensive exploration of radical feminism and how it relates to contemporary feminist discourse is a little more academic in nature. Hang in there!

In the West: Oligarchy = White Supremacy = Patriarchy = Corporate Capitalism (get it?)

image is from here

image is from here

image is from here

CEO Compensation 1970-2000 (Conley, D.)

[source: *here*]

Ideas That [Don't] Matter: The Concepts about Feminism A. C. Grayling Gets Wrong in his new book

portrait of A. C. Grayling and some books piled on a desk in a posh room is from here

I would argue that men with very distinct hairstyles want to be known. They want an identity that is viewable. I've seen this with Michel Foucault and Ken Wilber too. Often the people who want to be known for their image are "men of ideas". What is it with white male thinkers making this sort of physical statement? I was going to say "philosophers" but that term is quite overused when it comes to what white men do, and is rarely used to describe men of color or any women, such as Marimba Ani and Andrea Dworkin. Women are called "theorists" perhaps. Men are called Philosophers. There's a difference in status between men and women, and between whites and people of color, in white male supremacist societies I've been part of or have seen depicted, culturally, in film or literature. The differences in status are hierarchically arranged, and are oppressive-to-lethal to those on the bottom.

A. C. Grayling is an author and he teaches at some colleges. Here's how he puts it, on his website:

Anthony Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL, FRSA is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are "Ideas That Matter", "Liberty in the Age of Terror" and "To Set Prometheus Free". 

For several years he wrote the "Last Word" column for the Guardian newspaper and now writes a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He writes the Thinking Read column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine. 

In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. 

Anthony Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. 

He is a Trustee of the London Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Booker Prize judge, and in 2010 is a judge of the Art Fund prize.

Here's a list of some of the things he's been published in: http://www.acgrayling.com/publications

Given all this studying, reading, and writing, and gathering of prestigious, status-giving experience (in the eyes of other similarly statused white men, especially), you'd think he might actually be semi-intelligent on the matter of feminism and the global condition of women and how white men, in particular, have a key role in the destruction of women and girls' lives across every continent except Antarctica. (No such luck.)

18 April 2011 note: I've decided to put the uninterrupted text here first. You can then read my thorough analysis and critique afterwards. With only one exception--due to him using a term I object to being used--I present his words as they appear in his book.

What has been typed by me below, posted here for the purposes of much-needed political and ethical critique, appears published on pages 150, 151, and 152 of Grayling's 2009 book titled Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century. It is the entirety of a section on Feminism. As you shall see, I argue it is a truly racist, misleading, sexist, and inaccurate, lie-promoting summary of feminism. And it is likely his understanding of feminism comes primarily or only from secondary sources.

On those three book pages, which doesn't amount to much when typed into a blog post, he presents his racist, white-washed, inaccurate account of "feminism", located by him largely in the U.S. and UK, with the pages' content focusing on 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He adds truly disgusting, stunningly politically colonialistic, culturally imperialistic 21st century prescriptions for what "advanced" white women ought to do for those supposedly all-poor, allegedly backwards Brown and Black women who don't live where whites do--apparently. (I'm not kidding. He says this C.R.A.P. You'll see.)

Feminism is a complex set of overlapping movements in the political, social and cultural spheres aimed at promoting and defending the interests of women in society. One way of expressing the aim of this set of movements would be to say that feminists seek to achieve equal rights with men, not the least equal pay for equal work; but some more radical feminists wish to bring about a dispensation in which male status and pay cease to be what define women's aspirations.
So diverse are the perspectives and concerns of feminism that it cannot be accounted by a single ideology. Nevertheless there is a core of questions on which much feminist activism and theory focuses, including questions about the nature of sex and gender and their social construction, women's experience, violence against women, the historical and institutional basis of patriarchy (male domination) and the correlative subjection of women, stereotyping and sexual objectification, the right methods required for combating the forces and factors that militate against the achievement of feminist aims, and much besides.

The very first feminism on record might be found in Aristophanes's play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens and its allies decide to force their menfolk to stop the Peloponnesian War by refusing them sexual favours until they do so. They succeed. If organized activity by women had continued and diversified into areas of social injustice affecting women, the episode dramatized by Aristophanes would have become feminism proper.

One has to look to the eighteenth century to see the first proper intimations of organized feminist consciousness, in the views of the Marquis de Condorcet and later in the writings of the remarkable Mary Wollstonecraft. The term 'feminism' was coined in French (feminisme) by the socialist Charles Fourier, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869) gives it one of its best early statements; the book begins with the words, 'The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able ... that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.' 

The first great victories for feminism are arguably those of suffragism -- the campaign for the vote -- and access to universities and medical schools. Both campaigns began in the nineteenth century and by the 1920s were more or less assured of victory if not already victorious. But these gains served only to highlight many remaining barriers to fairness; for example, women with university degrees were still denied access to jobs carrying influence, power and high renumeration, either being refused access outright or meeting the 'glass ceiling' that prevented them from rising above a certain level of seniority.

The gainers of the qualified victories just mentioned are often called 'first-wave feminists'. The second wave was given its impetus by two  influential books, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In the turbulent 1960s, with many interconnected social and political upheavals occurring -- not least the civil liberties movement in the United States over the rights of African Americans -- together with a sexual revolution spurred by the contraceptive pill and liberalized attitudes, feminists found many opportunities to advance their case.

In the early 1970s in the United States two events favouring the situation of women occurred:  the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution was passed by Congress [though not ratified], and the Roe versus Wade abortion case accorded women 'the right to choose'.

Since these major battles, feminism (now 'third-wave feminism') has taken many forms ranging from the liberal to the radical-- from the quest for social and economic equality with men to separatist rejection of men, from theoretical interests to activism, from assertion of equal rights to arguments for special protections for women that (for example) include limiting male free speech (centrally focused on pornography), and much besides-- and there are also movements that deny the male-female dichotomy altogether ('Queer Theory'). On some classifications there are at least two and perhaps three dozen identifiable types of feminist movement. Whereas most people of either sex in the advanced world agree that equal pay and opportunity should be available to all equally qualified people irrespective of sex, race, or any other putative ground of difference, few agree with the extreme feminism exemplified by Andrea Dworkin's claim that all penetrative sexual intercourse is rape.

Feminism of all stripes has benefited from the work of eloquent and powerful advocates for various of its aspects and movements, among them Susan Brownmiller, Judith Butler, Mary Daly, Carol Gilligan, Germaine Greer, Catherine MacKinnon, Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham.

In view of the fact that the future health and safety of the world depend on the economic, educational and political advance of women, not least in Third World and developing countries, and among these not least again in the Middle East, it seems that the most vigorous and assertive feminist action should be targeted at a dramatic improvement of the of the lot of women in these places. Among Arab women in Middle East the literacy rate is only 47 per cent; in parts of central and east Africa girls are subjected to the horrors and dangers of [genital cutting]. [I replaced the term you use A.C. No woman I know from any region who experiences these practices appreciates being used by the likes of you to additionally "otherise" them and make them seem only disfigured and disabled]; in many parts of Africa it is found that if women receive just a few years of elementary schooling, they have fewer and healthier children, and gain access to rights and benefits that ignorance seals from them.

If 'First World' women have the means and the knowledge to help their sisters in these disadvantaged circumstances would strain every sinew to do so, the prospects not just for the women themselves but for the world as a whole would be transformed. The feminist challenge should surely place this struggle at its centre. [End.]

Now I offer my commentary and analysis in brackets and bold within the same three-page passage. I'll close with some additional concerns about his professional, public life.

Feminism is a complex set of overlapping movements in the political, social and cultural [and economic] spheres aimed at promoting and defending the interests of women in society [while also unearthing, interrogating, and challenging the underlying misogynist-racist and woman-degrading values and practices, structures and systems, ideologies and institutions that constitute and comprise any given society]. One way of expressing the aim of this set of movements would be to say that feminists seek to achieve equal rights with men, not the least equal pay for equal work; but some more radical [meaning: not 'extreme' but rather 'seeking to get to the root'] feminists wish to bring about a dispensation in which male [defined and protected] status and pay [and woman-degrading and woman-subordinating patriarchal practices] cease to be what define women's aspirations.

So diverse are the perspectives and concerns of feminism [which includes diversity of region, era, race, ethnicity, age, language, and fundamental worldview] that it cannot be accounted by a single ideology. [I agree with him about that. At issue is the narrowness of his grasp of what feminists have been, contemplate, and challenge, which shall be blatantly demonstrated soon.] Nevertheless there is a core of questions on which much feminist activism and theory focuses [particularly, as he will note, in the white West], including questions about the nature of sex and gender and their social construction [and the nature of 'nature' itself, and its theoretical construction as something for men to conquer, assault, and possess], women's experience [and being], [men's] violence against women, the historical and institutional basis of patriarchy (male domination [and the accompanying man-ufactured ideology: male supremacy]) and the correlative [meaning: necessarily and willfully resultant--causally so] subjection [and assault] of women, stereotyping [, erasing, dehumanising, invalidating, ignoring,] and sexual objectification [, fetishisation, pornographisation, demonisation, and enslavement], the right methods required for combating the [male-protected] forces and [the perniciously globalised while socially, culturally, regionally, and temporally specific] factors that militate [meaning: serve as a powerful or conclusive factor in working] against the achievement of feminist aims, and much besides. [I'm curious to know what "and much besides" refers to in his understanding or experience.]

The very first [example of literary] feminism on record might [or, rather, is not to] be found in [comic writer] Aristophanes's play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens and its allies decide to force their menfolk to stop the Peloponnesian War by refusing them sexual favours until they do so. [There are problems here. First, it is unreasonable to assume that the very first feminist action--literary or otherwise--was written by a man even with many women being prevented from achieving a male supremacist, pro-patriarchal education for centuries to come. Second, to call this play "feminist" is to not understand the play's cultural function as comic theatre at all. Nor is it to understand the political climate: men ruled women. Period. While in some city-states women could own property, not so in Athens. In Athens women were a man's possession--either her father's or her husband's. (And Goddess Athena help the woman who had neither--or either.) There was no such authority of women to demand anything at all, least of all that men stop war, or rape. Third, I find the word choice "decide to force their menfolk to stop ... war"--this alone indicates some comical fantasy of the play writer; Western patriarchal forces were already organised to prevent women from having this power. The phrasing suggests what was likely an absurd idea of the time and place: that men belong to women, which given the treatment of women at the time is, indeed, "comical"; this status of women relative to men has not been the case in reality in the non-Indigenous Western world before or since the era of Aristophanes and Plato. Fourth, the phrase "refusing them sexual favours until they do so" is hardly what one might think: in the play, it involves women dressing scantily; nuff said. The comic play and the presentation of it here as "feminist", carries with it so many misogynistic assumptions: that women might actually have or have had the sexual power over men such that wars can be prevented if only women withdraw sexual rights of access to men that women did not socially or lawfully possess; that men view sex as something women offer men as "favours", rather than something men take from women as a male supremacist and rapist right or entitlement. Women in that society were property; wives were sexual slaves.  Masters aggressively and callously take labor from slaves. Slaves are whipped or beaten for not submitting "properly". Slaves don't offer "favours" to slave-owners. This view of women's almost totalitarian sexual power must have been uproariously funny to the men-only audience, viewing and enjoying a production of this play.] They succeed. [Histerical. That Aristophanes! He's such a laugh riot. To get a sense of what this play is actually about, please see *here*] If organized activity by women had continued [in men's misogynistic imaginations, such as that comic playwright's?] and diversified into areas of social injustice affecting women [unlike anything depicted in that play], the episode dramatized by Aristophanes would have become feminism proper. [What's "feminism proper"? Is that opposed to feminism improper? Regardless, this assessment is not grounded in reality. The power arrangements were not in place for such gendered resistance, let alone for women to have leverage or control over men's behaviors such as rape and war.]

One has to look to the [white West again, this time in the] eighteenth century to see the first proper [there's that 'legitimising' word again] intimations [meaning (perhaps): communicated evidence] of organized feminist consciousness, in the views of the Marquis de Condorcet [another man; he was in favor of some form of equality between the sexes and among the races. But in case you're not getting the "thrust" of this writing--A. C. is intimating that it was men at least as much as women who are responsible for "proper" feminism.  I say: bullshit.] and later in the writings of the remarkable Mary Wollstonecraft. The term 'feminism' was coined in French (feminisme) by the socialist Charles Fourier, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869) gives it one of its best early statements; the book begins with the words, 'The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able ... that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.' [Even if Grayling can't see feminism beyond the white West, why doesn't he tell us anything about Mary Astell, Lady Chudleigh, Mary Collier, Mme. De Beaumer, Bluestockings, Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, Constantia (Judith Sargent Stevens Murray), Olympe de Gouges--all women, many of whom wrote before Condorcet, Fourier, and Mill--all men?]

The first great victories for feminism [in the white West as A. C. understands it] are arguably those of suffragism -- the campaign for the vote -- and access to universities and medical schools. [I'll introduce a rather key objection to this way of understanding feminism's roots and early activities: it completely relegates women of color to being non-existent; it ignores how Indigenous, Black, and Brown women introduced key concepts and lived as key figures in their own societies and also in dominant white-majority societies, demonstrating how to "do" gender differently. It is clear, and it becomes far clearer as we progress here, that A. C. cannot and will not consider the possibility that women who were not white are the founders and shapers of contemporary feminist movements because he only can view "ideas that matter" as happening in white societies; and later you'll see how he even assumes that it can only be "advanced" white women who bring "ideas that matter" to poor women of color. He barely considers anyone but white men to be the founders of any worthwhile ideas-that-matter. I am skeptical about the seemingly unrecognised biases A. C. shows, flagrantly, in not being able to conceive, understand, seek out, or promote the ideas, theories, philosophies, of women of color on their own terms, in their own cultural contexts, including in a white-dominant contenxt. Indigenous women's ideas and actions shaped white women's understandings and beliefs in the possibility of equality among the sexes. This has been documented by Sally Roesch Wagner.] Both campaigns began in the nineteenth century and by the 1920s were more or less assured of victory if not already victorious. But these gains served only to highlight many remaining barriers to fairness; for example, women with university degrees were still denied access to jobs carrying influence, power and high renumeration, either being refused access outright or meeting the 'glass ceiling' that prevented them from rising above a certain level of seniority. [By this time two very key figures in feminist herstory have already lived and died, leaving their mark: Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Why no mention of them? There were and remain far more fundamental issues to contend with: such as whether girls and women are to be treated as human beings by men; whether women are allowed to possess their own bodies and lives; whether girls and women are to be trafficked--a practice that C. Columbus introduced upon arrival in the islands and land masses later known as the Americas; and whether men's speech, in using women's bodies to say what pimps believe women are for, is more socially important than women's rights to not be depicted and actually used as wh*res and slaves for rape and other abuses. Grayling clues us into his views on some of these matters below. And it's not pretty.]

The gainers of the qualified victories just mentioned are often called 'first-wave feminists'. The second wave was given its impetus by two  influential books, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In the turbulent 1960s, with many interconnected social and political upheavals occurring -- not least the civil liberties movement in the United States over the rights of African Americans -- together with a sexual revolution spurred by the contraceptive pill and liberalized attitudes, feminists found many opportunities to advance their case. ["African Americans", just above, appears to only refer to men. But we must consider the contributions to feminism that Black women--feminists--in the U.S. made, such as Johnnie Tillmon. I have seen enough white-washed accounts of feminist herstory to know that A. C. is only parroting what he's read in those racist secondary sources. And it is also important to note that what most women do that is organised resistance to patriarchal atrocity and ideology, is not done by women who define themselves necessarily as "feminist". Grayling shows that if the idea-makers are men, they needn't identify as "feminist". But if they are women, they probably ought to identify in ways that white women with education and class privilege identify, or else their ideas don't matter to him because he never sees them as ideas-that-matter to begin with. He makes no mention of the rather important ideas in the books Women, Race, and Class and Yurugu. He can write far more about some forgotten white man (who, prior to reading those few pages in his book, I'd never heard of in my life) and ignore Angela Davis and Marimba Ani's contemporary work because he's white and male and few people will call him out on it. Indeed, few people in his social or academic circles will have read and promote the work--the ideas that matter--of Angela Davis and Marimba Ani. I'll pick up this point of critique later.]

In the early 1970s in the United States two events favouring the situation [situation?? The economic, sexual, and social subordination and gross exploitation of girls and women by men is far more than a "situation"; as a writer he ought to know language choice matters, and one of the ways we shape history is by using minimising terms to describe horrific histories of atrocity; would he say that the Jews in Europe dealt with many "situations" over the centuries? Perhaps he would. But he ought not] of women occurred:  the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution was passed by Congress [though not ratified], and the Roe versus Wade abortion case accorded women 'the right to choose'. [Roe v. Wade was a flawed effort by placing women's bodies under the law as private--arguing the government has no business invading privacy; the issue was not a right to choose at all; it was a right to consider women's bodies private rather than public, no matter how publicly (and privately) harassed and exploited women were. C. A. MacKinnon has argued convincingly that it would have made, and would make, far more sense to frame the issue as a civil rights one, not as a matter of privacy. "Privacy" in practice allows men to do things like commit incest (routine molestation, nightly assault, serial rape) against girls, and routine, serial rape against women to whom the men are married--U.S. white men and UK white men too--lots of men, not just men in Central Asia and Africa that A. C. speaks about condescendingly later on. Historically and currently, many people do not choose to be pregnant but get pregnant nonetheless--including in the West; many people do not choose to be forcibly sterilised--this happens disproportionately to Black, Brown, and Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. and is perpetrated by "civil" and "advanced" white men. Women do not choose whether men will or will not assault them, use a condom during the assault, or beat the shit out of a woman he has forcibly impregnated so that she miscarries the pregnancy. Women do not currently possess their own bodies in any way that resembles or approximates how men possess their own. Why doesn't A. C. Grayling promote the ideas of feminists who accurately call out white men for institutionally rigging the courts in the U.S., UK, and Australia, so that unrepentant raping and battering men get custody of the children they have already abused--abuse that includes beating up and raping their mothers in earshot or in view of the children?]

[I'll address the rest of my comments directly to you, Mr. Grayling.  I welcome your responses to the points raised above and the direct questions and matters I address to you below.]

Since these major battles [and so many others that you don't discuss], feminism (now 'third-wave feminism') [Here you also borrow from flawed and racist academic analyses of feminism as happening in distinct "waves", which are not historically or politically accurate; Indigenous women's resistance to the White Man, for example; Black and Brown women's resistance to the White Man, and to Black and Brown men too, is not accounted for in these allegedly distinct "waves"; and, regardless, you show no understanding at all of how so-called second-wave and third-wave feminism co-exist and interact] has taken many forms ranging from the liberal to the radical [for some, liberal  feminist campaigns are termed 'third-wave'; radical campaigns are understood as 'second-wave': this is also an inaccurate and often racist understanding and perspective; but second-wave feminists are presently active--they weren't a phase that existed and died away, much to misogynist and anti-feminist men's dismay and discontent; RAWA is the oldest revolutionary feminist organisation--and it has never existed in the U.S. or the UK. They've been pro-radical/pro-revolution all many the decades they've existed. So what "wave" are they, A. C.? And why don't you bother to mention them and the work they do--and the ideas-that-matter that they publish? What are the main ideas that rise out of various Indigenous feminists' work? Can you describe and discuss even one?]-- from the quest for social and economic equality with men [with which men, Grayling? With poor white men? With poor Black and Brown men? With Indigenous men? No. It appears, yet again, that people of color barely exist to you and that women of color, specifically, don't even register in your mind as existing in any central way at all] to separatist rejection of men [this is typically mislabeled "second-wave" and is not ever termed a 'third-wave' phenomenon, in my experience; and how male-centric to assume that separatism is a "rejection of men" and not a fully conscious choice to live WITH women? Were men who went to all-male academies, before they admitted women, "rejecting all women"? Why is women choosing to be with women necessarily framed up as something DONE TO MEN, rather than done for women? His misogyny and anti-lesbian biases leak through here], from theoretical interests to activism, from assertion of equal rights to arguments for special protections [special??] for women that (for example) include limiting male free speech (centrally focused on pornography) [ah, more misogyny and anti-feminism leaking into his discourse; the rights of women to not be filmed and photographed being trafficked and raped doesn't register in his mind as conceivable in terms of even being "a right"; the only "right" or "special protection" he advocates is for pimp-speech to dominate and silence women by traumatising women into silence and dissociation], and much besides [like what, A. C.? How about the challenge to end genocide--half of all people murdered genocidally are women, after all; what about stopping wealthy white men from trafficking and purchasing girls from across the globe; what about stopping white men from making Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. the most raped female population by ethnicity or race?]-- and there are also movements that deny the male-female dichotomy altogether ('Queer Theory'). [That's because gender is a social idea, as is "sex"; and feminists were interrogating that issue well before "Queer Theory" took it up in an academic setting. You are aware, aren't you, Grayling, that some societies have more than two genders, more than two sexes, and that the Western identities and labels are historically and regionally specific? You know that for a long time in the West it was assumed, by "smart" and "educated" MEN who would now be called heterosexual, that there was only one sex, right? You know the history of the term "invert", don't you? I'm curious about why there are quotation marks around the term Queer Theory? And I'm wondering also why you assume it has much or any relation to what feminists are doing. Because a significant amount of academic Queer Theory is liberal,  pro-patriarchal, anti-woman, and anti-lesbian.] On some classifications there are at least two and perhaps three dozen identifiable types of feminist movement. [For those who indulge in typology of feminism, rather than the typology of and political challenge to male supremacists and forms of patriarchy.] Whereas most people of either sex in the advanced [!!!] world [which means traditional, uncolonised Indigenous societies are what, A. C.? Behind, inferior, an impediment or obstacle to proper "advancement" of "civilisation"? Has it occurred to you that Western civilisation is in fact grossly savage and sadistic, cruel beyond any imagination, not at all "civil" or "advanced", and is also utterly unsustainable while militantly and egregiously ecocidal? What's the "advanced" part again?] agree that equal pay and opportunity should be available to all equally qualified people irrespective of sex, race, or any other putative ground of difference, few agree with the extreme [didn't you use the word "radical" earlier?] feminism exemplified by Andrea Dworkin's claim that all penetrative sexual intercourse is rape. [Ah. You're a liar, A. C. Please show us all where she wrote that or said it in a recorded speech? Have you seen this about that lie as it has been spread around, starting in pornography, as if either or both Andrea Dworkin or Catharine A. MacKinnon said it? And please note the spelling of the latter political philosopher's name. She's much smarter than you are, by the way. You might want to actually read her work some time.]

Feminism of all stripes [feminism doesn't come in stripes; prisoners do] has benefited from the work of eloquent and powerful advocates for various of its aspects and movements, among them [hey, A. C., just for kicks, let's see how many of the women you list as eloquent and powerful are not white!] Susan Brownmiller [white], Judith Butler [white], Mary Daly [white], Carol Gilligan [white], Germaine Greer [white], Catherine MacKinnon [white] [first name spelled wrong; a certain sign that secondary sources only were referenced], Juliet Mitchell [white] and Sheila Rowbotham [white]. [Hmmm. Your racist sexism is showing, Grayling. No Audre Lorde? Barbara Smith? Alice Walker? bell hooks? Patricia Hill Collins? Andrea Smith? Malalai Joya? Yanar Mohammed? Vandana Shiva? What do you consider the work of Marimba Ani to be? Feminist, anti-racist, or both? Just to clue you in, Audre Lorde's work is far more foundational and important than Butler's in both feminism and queer theory.]

In view of the fact that the future health and safety of the world [of men, for men, by men] depend on the economic, educational and political advance [!! there's that nasty word again] of women [educational as in the genocidal, sexually and spiritually abusive education Indigenous girls and boys got in North America through the 1960s?], not least in Third World and developing countries [your "First World" racism is showing again, this time a bit more nakedly; you may wish to read the collected works of Vandana Shiva before you start your arrogant preaching about how whites must help those poor, only-suffering, only-victimised Brown and Black people on those "other" continents and in those "other" regions--who couldn't possibly be brilliantly organising their own political and economic strategies for survival and beyond], and among these not least again in the Middle East [yeah, like that region: read Ms. Joya and Ms. Mohammed's work, why don't you, and learn something about how unfathomably fucked up your "advanced" society is--and its 'ethics' are] and parts of south Asia [ah, and that region: please study the activist work of Ruchira Gupta and Vandana Shiva--again, for some of the most "advanced" feminist theory you're going to find anywhere in the world], it seems that the most vigorous and assertive feminist action should be targeted [like a coloniser's ethnic-cleansing bomb or a strategic military plan?] at a dramatic improvement of the of the lot of women in these places. [Why not consider the lot of white women and women of color in your own country, sir? Do the women in your country have a "lot"? Or is that just a term you use for people you think of as "not advanced" and "not improved"?] Among Arab women in Middle East the literacy rate is only 47 per cent [you're really just unable to stop yourself from trotting out all these racist-misogynist tropes, in the guise of 'facts', aren't you? I assure you, plenty of Middle Eastern women have had very good educations; Yanar Mohammed is one of them--and she is much smarter than you, sir]; in parts of central and east Africa girls are subjected to the horrors and dangers of [genital cutting]. [I replaced the term you use A.C., which no woman I know from any region who experiences these practices appreciates being used by the likes of you to additionally "otherise" and make them seem only disfigured and disabled]; in many parts of Africa it is found that if women receive just a few years of elementary schooling, they have fewer and healthier children [because no matter what, let's be sure to mention that the social function of women isn't to grow up and be somebody--like you--but to have babies. (Did you produce babies, A. C. How many?) And if you're Black or Brown you're agenda should be to have fewer babies, shouldn't it? What about those extra-large white Christian families I see across the U.S.--conceived not because the women choose to, but because the husband won't use birth control and feels entitled to force himself oh "his" wife? What about the lack of education and health care available to so many children in the West? Oops. We're supposed to pretend we don't have "their" non-advanced problems], and gain access to rights and benefits that ignorance seals from them. [What an ignorant, condescending, socially and culturally illiterate white male supremacist bigot you are. Truly. You should be ashamed of yourself. Why don't you read some of the writings of Dora Byamukama and educate yourself about your own deeply entrenched regional, racial, sexual, and cultural stupidity.]

If 'First World' [if you mean WHITE, why don't you say so? Many of the great feminists I named above are 'First World' but you failed to notice or mention them at all] women have the means and the knowledge to help their sisters [dood: you're a fool. What makes you think women of color regard anyone white as "their sisters" necessarily? And what's your evidence that whites regard people of color as fully human? You get that whites--women and men--unrepentantly and lethally oppress women and men of color, right?] in these disadvantaged circumstances would strain every sinew to do so [and what about white MEN straining some sinews to end things like globalised capitalism, poverty, famine, militarism, overpopulation, trafficking and sexual slavery? Are you able to promote that agenda as a moral or ethical idea that matters? Are you able to understanding how the white West is directly and murderously implicated, causally, with every economic, political atrocity going on in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South Asia? Men from Europe produce and market munitions to many countries in Africa. Why don't you mention that when you mention Africa? What's the function of rendering invisible how European men influence and enforce rapist-racist atrocities? Are you able to call on "advanced" and "educated" white men to stop being so fucking ignorant and to wake up and start listening to the moral and ethical leaders of this world--who are women of all colors, including especially from Central and South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa? And also Indigenous women globally? Is that political prescription an idea that might matter?], the prospects not just for the women themselves but for the world [meaning men: the world of men, by men, for men] as a whole would be transformed. [Because you surely don't think men are going to to jack shit to end all the atrocities, do you? And because you won't call on men to take up these issues--the ones that most harm women and girls--you pass off that work to your white, educated, advanced "sisters" don't you, brother?] The feminist challenge should surely place this struggle at its centre. [No, sir. YOU and all your many "brothers" should place the struggles of ALL women at YOUR moral, ethical, and political centre. Or are you morally,  ethically, and politically incapable of calling on men to stop rape, racism, trafficking, using the misogynist court system to give custody of children, immorally and unethically, to battering and incest perpetrating men... oh, and military warfare? You might try suggesting to other class privileged white men like yourself that you all stop traumatising and terrorising women with unwelcomed and unwanted sexual "favours".]

I'll close this post by noting that I am deeply concerned about him ever having been chairperson of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and do not feel encouraged in him being a non-colonialistic, unbigoted representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. That he has been a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world, only leads me to wonder what those who appointed or approved him having those roles understood his racist, sexist philosophy and ethical position to be. I hope such Union and Forum decision-makers will reconsider offering him such statused positions in the future.