The Prophet, the Philosopher, and the Poet

I am a feminist and I am angry. But don’t take it personally – I am not angry at you.

I am angry that in developing countries, women still suffer legal injustices, endure domestic violence and conflicts, have unequal access to healthcare and nutrition and education and die in disproportionate numbers because of this; angry that in the ‘first world’, adolescent girls are cutting and starving themselves, rape and domestic violence statistics remain high, women still lack proportionate representation in the higher echelons of the political and business world. I am angry that both men and women face enormous pressure to conform to particular standards of masculinity and femininity, to standards of beauty and being that limit people’s ability to choose their path and to be judged solely on their strengths and weaknesses.

To me, this is unacceptable. I do not offer these examples to complain, or to whine that women are ‘weak and oppressed’, because I know many women who live under oppressive conditions with such dignity and power. But that does not mean they do not suffer injustice.

My anger, to some, is unpalatable. By some estimation feminism has become the new ‘F-word’, leading some younger women to avoid the label of ‘feminist’ lest they be perceived as angry man-haters. (My own mother cautions me to tell people that I don’t hate men, largely for this reason!) Martha Nussbaum explains this by talking about Prophets and Philosophers, showing how some second wave feminists – the ‘Prophets’ – raged, using extreme and unforgiving rhetoric to decry what they felt were extreme injustices. These feminists, like Andrew Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon, have been subsequently polarizing in their polemic.Then there have been the Philosophers, like John Stuart Mill, who are careful, nuanced, reasoned. They can offer insights into gender construction (Judith Butler), masculine domination (Pierre Bourdieu), and so on, from very academic standpoints that may spark disagreement but rarely offence. But in this coolly analytical approach something is lost – the sense of injustice that impels action, the queasy burning sensation that not all is right with the world and we have to do something about it. For I believe that anger can be a good thing – anger can be a positive and empowering force that we can embrace and leverage to affect change, so long as it is anger at injustice, anger at inequality, anger at the structures and systems that perpetuate these injustices.

So what are our choices? Do we rage without reason? Do we become so reasonable – and thus more ‘palatable’ to society – that we lose the power of anger?

In the book Finally Comes the Poet, Walter Brueggeman speaks of the necessity of speaking poetry to a ‘prose-flattened world’. This ‘daring speech’ is neither complacent, nor trivial, but proclaims truth and offers an alternative vision. A feminist Poet reacts with power and urgency to the hierarchical world she – or he – sees, but does not limit this reaction to angry criticism or calm analysis. Instead we must re-envision our world with truth, bringing rage and reason to bear on imagining a future where the sex of a person does not determine his or her place in it – a world where being born a girl does not mean you are at risk of female infanticide, or denied literacy or economic control, or taught that the female body has to be ever submitted to male desire. I think of Martin Luther King, offering a dream to the world. He was a Prophet, but also a Poet, using language that showed how a world made ugly by hierarchy could be saved by the beauty of equality.

It is time to reclaim anger at injustice – to be Prophets once again – but to convey our message in a way that draws upon the best of Philosophers to speak clearly and convincingly. But finally comes the Poet. So let us speak truth and beauty into our future. Let us call ourselves feminists, and know all that this implies and demands. Echoing King, let us dream together of a world where people are no longer judged by the shape of their sex, but by the content of their character.