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July 15, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
29:36
Bell Hooks： Anita Sarkeesian's Influence
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Hi there.
Are you familiar with this lady?
I'm going to show you a remix that I just finished this weekend and no one else has seen.
One person has seen it.
It's a soundtrack of one song, except I'm doing video games.
So that's not exactly a fandom.
I'm not a fan of video games.
I actually had to learn a lot about video games in the process of making this.
I'm sure many of you have recognized her, but for those who haven't, this is video game critic Anita Sarkeesian.
Anita is a sour-faced feminist who is described by Bloomberg as the gaming industry's greatest adversary.
And why wouldn't they think that?
She's always on Twitter decrying the latest video game or movie that she has declared to be not feminist and therefore bad.
But hey, she'd know, right?
I mean, it's not like she wasn't on Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People list and representing gaming no less.
I mean she is forever standing on stages, giving speeches to thousands and thousands of people all around the world, telling everyone how oppressed she is by the patriarchy.
And all for no gain whatsoever, except to help women into gaming.
She is the champion that women need.
So there's no doubting that Anita is a very influential feminist inside and outside of the gaming industry.
It's because of her influence that it's interesting that she goes on Twitter not only to decry video games and movies, but also to talk about feminism.
But not just any kind of feminism, specifically Anita's personal brand of feminism, which is in direct conflict with what other feminists would call choice feminism.
Now, I'm going to play a three-minute clip of Anita explaining this from the Sydney Opera House.
And I know sitting through three minutes of Anita talking about feminism sounds like a living hell and why would I do this to you?
But I think it's important to really understand exactly where she's coming from.
I had to learn how to be a feminist.
So throughout high school and college, I was involved with clubs organizing against wars in the Middle East, raising awareness about climate change, and demanding gay and lesbian rights.
So I was heavily involved in social justice causes, but I still didn't call myself a feminist.
At the time, I may have even uttered the dreaded phrase, I believe in equality, but I'm not a feminist.
Yeah, not a high point in my life.
So like most people who grew up immersed in the neoliberal ideology of the West, I saw the world largely as a series of individuals making their own personal individual choices.
And here I was, a young woman, making my own personal choices about what to wear, what to buy, what to study, and what I wanted to do every day.
Within that narrow individualistic framework, feminism seemed like a relic of the distant past.
Back then, I thought sexism basically boiled down to a few bad apples with misguided personal beliefs born out of ignorance or overt hatred.
So it wasn't until I was in my early to mid-20s that I began to realize my impression of feminism had been completely wrong.
With the help of some amazing mentors and by reading a lot of feminist writing, especially the words of women of color and queer women from around the world, I learned to see through a sociological lens and understand the world as it really exists, as a series of intersecting social systems.
Once you have a systemic and institutional framework, you see how oppression manifests in many subtle ways under the systems of what Bell Hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
So not only did I have to learn how to be a feminist, I also had to learn how to be a feminist who understands systems.
I had to learn how systems of oppression are maintained by our participation in them, but they're also self-perpetuating via paths of least resistance, and as such, are larger than any one person's choices.
Okay, so this is the part where I say things that may ruffle some feathers.
But I think it's a critical discussion to have.
So over the past few years, I've become increasingly worried about the direction mainstream internet feminism appears to be headed, at least in the West.
Unfortunately, many contemporary discourses in and around feminism tend to emphasize a form of hyper-individualism, which is informed by that neoliberal worldview.
More and more, I hear variations on this idea that anything that any woman personally chooses to do is a feminist act.
This attitude is often referred to as choice feminism.
Choice feminism posits that each individual woman determines what is empowering for herself, which might sound good on the surface, but this concept risks obscuring the bigger picture and larger fundamental goals of the movement by focusing on individual women with a very narrow individual notion of empowerment.
It erases the reality that some choices that women make have an enormous negative impact on other women's lives.
So it's not enough to feel personally empowered or be personally successful within the oppressive framework of the current system.
Even if an individual woman can make patriarchy work for her, it's still a losing game for the rest of the women on the planet.
The fact of the matter is that some choices have ramifications beyond ourselves and reinforce harmful patriarchal ideas about women as a group and about women's bodies in our wider shared culture.
And because of how systems of oppression intersect and compound one another, it's women of color, indigenous women, women living in the global south, women with disabilities, queer women, and trans women who bear the brunt of these ramifications.
Choice feminism also obscures the fact that women don't have a real choice.
We have a very narrow set of predetermined choices within patriarchy.
Women can choose from a pre-approved palette, but we cannot meaningfully choose liberation.
We cannot choose a way out from our constraints, at least not without ending these oppressive systems that limit our options.
So when we talk about free choice in today's world, we're really talking about a very narrow spectrum of choices that are amenable to patriarchy.
So when we talk about how to be a feminist, for me, that means being committed to something much larger than ourselves.
It's understanding what role you play in our collective movements for liberation.
So there are a lot of interesting things to note about Anita's little speech there.
I mean, not least is the fact that she claims that she's oppressed and needs to be liberated, whilst being a wealthy woman sat on a stage with six other wealthy women.
If you watch the entire thing, you'll notice that she's the only person who has brought a pre-written script and is reading verbatim from it.
And she is also having a great deal of influence on the people around her.
You can see Jermaine Greer's face looking rather perplexed with the things that Anita was saying and the lady on the left who was taking notes.
Given Anita's large degree of influence over other people, I then become curious as to who has influence over Anita.
And in that speech, you'll notice that she only mentioned one person by name.
Once you have a systemic and institutional framework, you see how oppression manifests in many subtle ways under the systems of what Bell Hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Anita specifically mentions a lady called Belle Hooks.
Now, the chances are you don't know who Belle Hooks is, and I don't blame you.
She is a long-term radical feminist.
And she has long been one of Anit Sarkeesian's primary influences, if not the primary influence, as far as I can tell.
Not only is Belle Hooks referenced many times on Anita's own feminist frequency website, linking directly to her videos, she's even cited as a source in Anita Sarkeesian's master's thesis.
In various interviews, Anita goes on to describe Bell Hooks as a real-life hero who has been highly influential in her political formation and her professional life.
And she even says that the inspiration to start feminist frequency came in part from Belle Hooks' work.
So I thought it important to trace this all back to its source.
So I thought I would get a couple of books by Belle Hooks.
So that's precisely what I did.
The first and most important book that I got was a book called Feminism is for Everybody, which I decided to go through with a fine-tooth comb.
I chose this book for several reasons, which can really be summed up from a quote from the introduction.
Quote, I want to have in my hand a little book so that I can say, read this book, and it will tell you what feminism is, what the movement is about.
I want to be holding in my hand a concise, fairly easy-to-read and understand book.
Not a book thick with hard-to-understand jargon and academic language, but a straightforward, clear book, easy to read without being simplistic.
It is for men, young and old, and for all of us that I have written this short handbook, a book that I have spent more than 20 years longing for.
I chose this book because it was obvious from the outset that this book is designed to explain the feminist worldview as understood by Belle Hooks.
Despite only being 118 pages long, Feminism is for Everybody is a very comprehensive look at Bell Hooks' worldview.
I mean, just listing the chapter headings will show you the wide variety of spheres that she thinks that feminism should be involved with.
Chapter 1, Feminist Politics.
Chapter 2, Consciousness Raising.
Chapter 3, Sisterhood is Still Powerful.
Chapter 4. Feminist Education for Critical Consciousness.
Chapter 5. Our Bodies Ourselves.
Chapter 6. Beauty Within and Without.
Chapter 7. Feminist Class Struggle.
Chapter 8. Global Feminism.
Chapter 9. Women at Work.
Chapter 10. Race and Gender.
Chapter 11. Ending Violence.
Chapter 12. Feminist Masculinity.
Chapter 13. Feminist Parenting.
Chapter 14. Liberating Marriage and Partnership.
Chapter 15. A Feminist Sexual Politic.
Chapter 16. Total Bliss, Lesbianism and Feminism.
Chapter 17. To Love Again.
Chapter 18. Feminist Spirituality.
Chapter 19. Visionary Feminism.
Now, just the names of some of these chapters are probably setting alarm bells ringing for some of the more sceptically minded of you watching this video.
One thing I've noticed is that almost everything that Anita says and does in the public sphere can be explained adequately by things contained within this book.
So on to the analysis then.
Well, before we get started, I think it's important to note the positive aspects of Bell Hooks, because there are some.
To her credit, Bell Hooks is fair.
She doesn't ever suggest a double standard for men and women.
She suggests that everyone should be held to the same standard under her proposed rules.
Unlike many feminists, she's under no illusions that all men are evil and all women are good.
In fact, she goes out of her way to explain how what she calls patriarchy isn't really gendered.
It's not really tied to male or female.
It's more tied to attitude.
The second point I think it's important to note about Bell Hooks in her favour is that she's not coming from the man-hating school of feminism.
In fact, she distinctly recognises that there is a large portion of feminism that is overtly man-hating and she attempts to distance herself from it.
Unfortunately, the only remaining good thing I have to say about Bell Hooks is that she's easy to read.
She doesn't waste any time and gets directly to her point using clear and concise language.
So to begin, I think it's important to talk about where Bell Hooks has simply made mistakes.
The first thing to note is that Bell Hooks is rather prone to using fallacies.
A few examples of this would be on page 11, where she says that women who are choice feminists are actually undermining feminism and therefore they are not really feminists.
This is a no-true Scotsman fallacy.
On page 29, she commits a slippery slope fallacy by saying if women do not have the right to choose what happens to our bodies, we risk relinquishing rights in all other areas of our lives, as if for some reason not having access to abortion means that they're going to lose the right to vote.
On page 73, she commits a Nirvana fallacy when she complains that all the medical facts show that children are violently abused daily in this society.
Well, unfortunately, it's unlikely anyone's ever going to end the abuse of children.
Realistically, all that can be hoped for is for it to be at a very low level.
And all throughout the book, Bell Hooks is guilty of using weasel words, such as sometimes, maybe, can do, might do, instead of using direct and specific examples and conditions when making her points.
Not only are the fallacies she uses self-contradicting, but Hooks often contradicts herself, sometimes on the same page.
For example, at the top of page 27, she says, The development of effective though not totally safe birth control pills created by male scientists, most of whom were not anti-sexists, truly paved the way for female sexual liberation more so than abortion rights.
Then at the bottom of the page, she complains about the capitalist patriarchal male-dominated medical system that controlled women's bodies and did with them anything that they wanted to do.
Well, I can only assume that what the capitalist patriarchal male-dominated medical system wanted to do with women's bodies is relinquish control and give them sexual liberation.
Elsewhere on page 27, she says, While I never had an unwanted pregnancy in the heyday of sexual liberation, many of my peers saw abortion as a better choice than conscious, vigilant use of birth control pills, and they did frequently use abortion as a means of birth control.
And then on page 29, she says, if sex education, preventative healthcare, and easy access to contraceptives are offered to every female, fewer of us will have unwanted pregnancies.
As a consequence, the need for abortions would diminish.
Well, I'm afraid, Belle, what you've just said on the previous page is that your friends chose to have abortions instead of using the pill, presumably because it was easier.
Your own experiences do not bear out your assertions.
They are the more overt issues that I have with this book, but they're not really all that important, because it doesn't really matter if she's making mistakes in the book.
What matters for this video is what Anit Sarkisian is taking away from it.
So let's start with the elephant in the room.
Anita Sarkisian's wacky tweets about how feminism is about the collective liberation for women as a social class, and that feminism is not about personal choice, and how she addressed the myth of choice feminism in the short talk that we saw earlier.
The short answer to this is that these opinions have been lifted directly from Bell Hooks' work, because Belle Hooks is a Marxist.
Throughout Feminism is for Everybody, Bell Hooks goes to great lengths to try and portray men and women as distinct social classes, which I'm sure everyone can agree is nonsense.
This can be most evidently seen on page 39.
Quote, Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production.
Class involved your behaviour, your basic assumptions, how you were taught to behave, and what to expect from yourself and from others.
Your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, and act.
Now, you may be thinking something along the lines of, wait a minute, that's absolutely nonsense.
Marx himself didn't believe in a patriarchy and thought the last thing that could be classified as a patriarchy fell with the fall of feudalism, and you'd be right.
What they are doing is misappropriating Marx's principles of class conflict and applying them to men and women.
Needless to say, all through the book, this completely distorts Belle Hooks' worldview on the relationships between men and women.
And this is despite her repeatedly complaining about upper class wealthy women not falling into the sisterhood with lower class poor women like herself.
She calls these women reformist feminists, and she considers them somewhat of a traitor to what she's trying to achieve, because they aren't interested in completely destroying the system and rebuilding anew.
They are interested in reforming the system to be fair to both men and women.
I don't think it would be unfair if you were to term bell hooks and any Sarkeesian's feminism as Marxist feminism and the more choice-oriented reformist feminism as capitalist feminism.
You may remember that I mentioned a chapter called Feminist Class Struggle.
Well, I'll read you a few quotes from it and you'll be able to see for yourself.
Page 37.
Conflict arose between the reformist visions of women's liberation, which basically demanded equal rights for women within the existing class structure, and more radical and or revolutionary models, which called for fundamental change in the existing structure so that models of mutuality and equality could replace the old paradigms.
On page 41.
Many more feminist women found it and find it easier to consider divesting of white supremacist thinking than of their class elitism.
As privileged women gained greater access to economic power with men of their class, feminist discussions of class were no longer commonplace.
Instead, all women were encouraged to see the economic gains of affluent females as a positive sign for all women.
In actuality, these gains rarely changed the lot of the poor and working class women.
Page 43.
Significantly, a visionary movement would ground its work in the concrete conditions of working class and poor women.
That means creating a movement that begins education for critical consciousness, where women, feminist women with class power, need to be put in a place of low-income housing women can own.
The creation of housing co-ops with feminist principles would show the ways feminist struggle is relevant to all women's lives.
And from the final paragraph of this chapter, we will then be able to better envision a world where resources are shared and opportunities for personal growth abound for everyone irrespective of their class.
From page 51, she quotes a previous book of hers called Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre, where she says, Feminist focus on careerism, getting women employed into high-paying professions, not only alienated masses of women from feminist movement, it also allowed feminist activists to ignore the fact that increased entry of bourgeois women into the workforce was not a sign that women as a group were gaining economic power.
Had they looked at the economic situation of poor and working class women, they would have seen the growing problem of unemployment and increased entry of women from all classes into the ranks of the poor.
This primarily feeds into Bell Hooks' radicalism, and she knows that she is a radical, and she is under the impression that feminism originally was radical.
From page 4.
Reformist feminist thinking, focusing primarily on equality with men in the workforce, overshadowed the original radical foundations of contemporary feminism, which called for reform as well as an overall restructuring of society so that our nation would be fundamentally anti-sexist.
From page 9.
Many of the women who spearheaded the introduction of women's studies classes into colleges and universities had been radical activists in civil rights struggles, gay rights, and the early feminist movement.
Not only does Bellhooks wish to remake Western society in her model of radical Marxist feminist politics, she is complaining often in this book that whites women are really not as radical as she is.
From page 41.
Supporting what, in effect, became white power reformist feminism enabled mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.
I could go through the book and pull out probably a dozen more examples of her advocating radicalism, but I won't, because I really just think that the point's been made, and it shows why Anisakisian could make such an off-the-cuff comment, such as...
One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they tell you about their experiences.
She says this as if it's completely normal for us to want to do the radical thing of abandoning skepticism, which I find preposterous.
And this brings me to the final point that I really want to make about Bell Hooks' work.
Not only is she a radical revolutionary communist who wishes to tear down society, what she claims is the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and remake it anew, but she also sounds like a cult leader, which, again, I think is something that Anita Sarkeesian has picked up from her.
It is not normal for someone to read someone else's book and then say, Everything is sexist.
Everything is racist.
Everything is homophobic.
And you have to point it all out.
And point it all out, she does.
So let's have a look at why I think Belle Hooks is probably unwittingly a cult leader.
Now, the first thing to know is Belle Hooks is a very spiritual person herself.
The diehard Bell Hooks fans in this room know that I am deeply religious, deeply spiritual.
So my buddy over here.
Spiritual, okay, spiritual is great.
Religion is, we've had this discussion.
Religion to me is something, is something else than spiritual.
But some people want to have both and want to have both in a progressive, loving-kindness way.
That was actually one of the topics as I went around saying, you know, I'm going to talk to Gloria Steinham.
What do you want me to talk to her about?
And people said, well, you know, you're really into spirituality and she's very secular.
That's one of the things that you could talk to her about.
So let's hear.
How do you get by just being a secular person?
When I wake up in the morning and I walk about my home and I'm surrounded by these deities of many colors, it alters something within me.
In the same way that I think black people who have only had the opportunity to know white Jesus have something altered within them.
I mean, that same church that had white Jesus had these rules.
A female could not walk across the platform that was reserved for men only because we were unclean.
And I remember, you know, as a little girl wanting to ask my mother to explain why can't we walk across?
Why can't we speak from that platform?
So that we see that intersectionality of racism and sexism cooperating with one another.
And how do we disconnect?
Of course, New York City, I encourage all of you to take time if you haven't gone to the Rubin Museum.
They did an incredible show a while ago on the female Buddha.
And so that you again see what it means to see all of this power in different sizes, shapes, genders.
And I think that black people, will we ever really be able to decolonize our minds if we cannot find a way to imagine deities that resemble ourselves?
So not only is Hooks insanely religious, she also thinks that deities can be modified and changed at a whim.
In fact, it's preferable to do so, otherwise, as she says, we can't decolonize our thinking.
There are many, many phrases in this book that sound just remarkably cult-like.
I'll read a Fiona from the introduction, page nine.
We need to be clear that we are all participants in perpetuating sexism until we change our minds and hearts, until we let go sexist thought and action and replace it with feminist thought and action.
This is of course the feminist version of original sin.
On page 5, she says, works like Feminist Theory from Margin Center, books Hooks herself wrote, offer a liberatory vision of feminist transformation that never receives mainstream attention.
Masses of people have not heard of this book.
They have not rejected its message.
They do not know what the message is.
Which very much sounds like something Saul of Tarsus may well have said to the Corinthians.
Hooks talks about consciousness raising as if it's prayer.
On page 8, she says, Many hurt and exploited women use the consciousness raising group therapeutically.
It was a site where they uncovered and openly revealed the depths of their intimate wounds.
This confessional aspect served as a healing ritual.
Through consciousness raising, women gained the strength to challenge patriarchal forces at work and at home.
She also has a version of the devil.
On page 12, she says, It remains the necessary step for anyone choosing feminist politics that the enemy within must be transformed before we can confront the enemy outside.
The threat, the enemy, is sexist thought and behaviour.
On page 16, she says, Many white women simply turned their backs on the vision of sisterhood, closing their minds and hearts, very much like Pharaoh did with Moses.
And on page 17, she says, Through experience and hard work, and yes, by learning from our failings and mistakes, we now have in place a body of theory and shared practice that can teach new converts to feminist politics what must be done.
And none of this is even in the chapter titled Feminist Spirituality.
I'm going to read you the first couple of sentences from that paragraph, but I'm going to replace the word feminism with Christianity.
Let me know how you think it sounds.
Christianity has been and continues to be a resistance movement which valorizes spiritual practice.
Before I had Christianity in practice to pull me fully into the awareness of the necessity of self-love and self-acceptance as a necessary for self-actualization, I walked on a spiritual path which affirmed those same messages.
Honestly, it is no wonder that Anita Sarkeesian, after being heavily influenced by Belle Hooks, is so against the idea of skeptical thought.
In fact, she seems to have taken a lot of cues herself in regards to becoming a cult leader.
Anita fakes the threats and harassment she receives on a regular basis, either by sending these threats to herself via sock puppet account or by enlisting an army of feminists to do it for her.
Where is that army?
It's right in front of you, Anita, and it's cheering wildly for you.
In keeping with the Christian theme of Belle Hooks' work, she is profoundly anti-violence, which is something that Anita is clearly picking up on.
On page 65 to 66, she says, We must acknowledge that men and women have together made the United States a culture of violence and must work together to transform and recreate that culture.
Women and men must oppose the use of violence as a means of social control and in all its manifestations.
War, male violence against women, adult violence against children, teenage violence, racial violence, etc.
Feminist efforts to end male violence against women must be expanded into a movement to end all forms of violence, which apparently in Anita's case include fictional forms.
Now I probably wouldn't have a particular problem with all of this if it wasn't so insidious.
What I mean by that is the redefining of words.
Now you may be familiar with the definition of feminism as so many feminists will point you to the dictionary and say, it's merely the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.
And that's great, because you're not going to find anyone who actively opposes that definition.
It's a definition everyone can agree on.
But more importantly, this definition doesn't demand a restructuring of the world in which we live.
This is a definition that's very, very comfortable for reformist feminists, as Bell Hooks would put them.
And as you may have already guessed, this is not the definition of feminism that Bell Hooks is using.
Belle Hooks gives us her definition of feminism on page one.
She says, simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
You can already see that if you define the world around you as a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, then everything about that definition demands revolution.
It demands that the system is torn down and remade anew.
In fact, this definition encompasses within it almost everything that's wrong with Belle Hooks's feminism.
She is convinced that not only do we live in a terribly oppressive society where she can become a wealthy woman through writing books, that all women are somehow beholden to her version of feminism because in her mind, her version of feminism is fighting for all women, even though there are women she disagrees with because they do not have any interest in playing her Marxist class politics game.
It is this presumptuous attitude to speak on behalf of all women that leads numb nuts like Anisian to say things like, You don't bite the hand that feeds you.
How despicable it is to automatically assume the mastery of all women for your ideological purposes.
So when Anita says that she is not interested in individual women's choices, she is serious.
When she says she wants you to listen and believe, she is serious.
She does not want to discuss what she's talking about.
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