Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

42 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?begin in and include indignation, but it is by far the more abiding passion.Resentment is "harbored" or "nurtured"; it "takes root" in a subject(the victim) and remains directed at another (the culprit). It can be vicarious—youneed not have harmed me personally, but if I identify withsomeone you have harmed, I may resent you. Such resentment is verycommon and may easily be as strong and intense as resentment occasionedby direct injury. In a way it is stronger, for by enlarging the classof victims to include others, it magnifies the villainy as well.Having demarcated a victimized "us" with whom I now feel solidarity,I can point to one victim and say, "In wronging her, he has betrayed hiscontempt for us all," or "Anyone who harms a woman harms us all," orsimply "What he did to her, he did to all of us." The next step is to regardthe individual who wronged "us" as himself representative of a group,giving our animus a larger target. This I may do quite "reasonably" byadopting a position from which people like the perpetrator (male, rich,etc.) are regarded as "the kind of people" who exploit people like "us."My social reality has now been dichotomized into two groups politicallyat odds, one of whom dominates and exploits the other.Susan Faludi, author of Backlash and one of the more popular resentersof our time, reminds us of the feminist truism that feminist anger comeswhen women construe their individual experiences in a political framework:"When you're not able to see your experience as political, you'renot able to be angry about it." 1Sandra Bartky, who is an expert onsomething she calls the "phenomenology of feminist consciousness," putsit succinctly: "Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . .to come to see oneself as a victim" (her emphasis). 2Once I get into the habit of regarding women as a subjugated gender,I'm primed to be alarmed, angry, and resentful of men as oppressors ofwomen. I am also prepared to believe the worst about them and the harmthey cause to women. I may even be ready to fabricate atrocities. EleanorSmeal spoke in Austin of the need to get women fighting mad. Neithershe nor any of the other feminist leaders and thinkers who promote thesexual politics of resentment and anger seem to be aware of how injuriouslydivisive their version of feminism is—or if they are, they seem notto care.Consider how Patricia Ireland, the president of NOW, speaks of herseven years as a flight attendant for Pan Am: "I thought of myself as aprofessional. But what I really did was go down the aisle and take people'sgarbage and thank them for it. That's what women have been doing.We've been taking their garbage and thanking them for it. We've got tostop." 3Ms. Ireland is telling us how easy it is (in a society that routinely