Questions: If politics is personal, what does it say about me if aspects of my personal life violates my politics? Does it make me a hypocrite? Does it mean my ideologies are not as strong as I supposed it? Is it appropriate for me to feel ashamed? Worst- why do I get the sense that this is pleasurably self-destructive and in a twisted, fucked up way, empowering? Am I not stronger, faster, smarter? How much do I get to disassociate myself from my body?
And most importantly, what the fuck am I doing? Why can't I stop?
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The phrase "the personal is political" wasn't intended to convey the idea that we (or in particular "women") ought to live our feminist political ideals in all of our actions.
It was originally pointing out that the problems faced by women (generally in their personal relationships) aren't simply personal matters (i.e. my husband is a jerk).
Many of the problems that women face in relationships aren't, they observed, isolated and unrelated. Rather, they are part of the systemic oppression of women by men which takes place not only at the level of the law, economy, and society, but at the most intimate and routine level of interpersonal relationships.
The idea was not for women to take upon themselves an additional standard of behavior, but rather to change and expand the framework within which they understood the problems that they face in their daily lives. Only by correctly diagnosing the collective nature of such problems could women seek to identify a common struggle and, ultimately, find solutions.
This is not to say that people should not aspire to live up to feminist ideals. Rather, that applying this standard in terms of gender politics places a further disproportionate burden on women, who have every reason to need to make compromises as survival tactics in a patriarchal society. Men, on the other hand, have no such excuse and should always examine their actions through a feminist lens.
This episode of "Vague History of Feminist Ideas with Dominic Ryan" was brought to you by... the letter 'L.'
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