I’m sometimes surprised by just how threatened people seem to be by the explicit statement that individuals should make their own choices or live by their own values—even people who have an otherwise liberal and individualistic outlook. For example, I recently shared this article about polyamory on Facebook and quoted the bolded part of this paragraph (the boldface is mine):
So what’s left? The way I’ve expressed it for the last several years is, if you feel without reservation that the person who gets to choose how to structure your relationships is you, then no matter what choice you ultimately make, you’re poly. (Choices to be made in open, honest, sex-positive communication with your partner(s), of course, who naturally have the same choice. Every stakeholder gets a say, everyone negotiates, hopefully leading to agreements that meet everyone’s needs. Thus, poly is also about finding win-win. But that’s an effect, not a cause.) You get to decide how your relationship life looks. Not your mother, not your culture, not your government … you.
And, very shortly afterwards, a friend saw that post and commented to me that she must not be poly by that definition, because she thought that the structure of relationships should be based on negotiations with your partners, rather than by you alone. I didn’t choose to include the parenthetical caveat stressing that aspect in the sound byte that I quoted, because I thought that it went without saying in any understanding of polyamory. But, apparently, the idea that individualism and self-determination are dangerous and can exist only at the expense of the interest of others is so deeply ingrained in our culture that those reminders are necessary to get people past their reflexive revulsion at any suggestion that self-interest can form the basis of a functional morality. Given that it’s been about 13 years since I first read The Fountainhead, I’ve had plenty of time to get used to the understanding that self-interest almost always leads to mutual interest, so it’s very easy for me to forget that that connection isn’t particularly intuitive to people who aren’t Randians.
I found it interesting how strongly expressed this same mistrust of self-interest and personal choice is in this recent blog post by Ernesto Aguilar on People of Color Organize!, which critiques the SlutWalk events being organized by feminists around the country. In brief, the author’s argument is that the effort by the predominantly white organizers of SlutWalk to reclaim the word “slut” as a positive expression of sexual empowerment is occurring without consideration of how female sexuality is experienced in non-white communities, and is therefore merely reinforcing the power dynamics that already exist. There are complicated issues raised here that I’m really in no position to respond to adequately, so I don’t want to make an attempt to do so the subject of this post. But I do want to point out the way Aguilar uses the perceived conflict of self-interest versus community interest as a framing device for this post.
According to Aguilar, events like SlutWalk “are about everyone individually for themselves defining whatever they think is good for them, regardless of its impact on other communities.” They represent a “super libertarian wet dream of personal preference” and “stubborn I’ll-do-whatever-I-want individualism,” characterized by “uber-libertarian fuck-the-world-it’s-about-my-needs rhetoric.” “Unquestioned is the desire” among the feminists who participate in SlutWalk “to be unaccountable to one other, but only ourselves, our moods and personal likes as an organizing aspiration.” The movement “isn’t about institutional violence against women, but one’s right to do a particular thing or two in a society whose anti-woman basis does not change.” And he questions whether “any successful sociopolitical movement sustained any gain when its primary attraction is the freedom to define yourself by whatever institutionally constructed image you ‘want’.”
All of this, by the way, sounds very familiar to anyone who has ever read the accusations that are traditionally leveled against Ayn Rand and her ideas by liberals (and plenty of conservatives too, until very recently).
So why is it such a problem that women are doing what they personally believe to be best for them, according to Aguilar?
A problem with initiatives where one’s work is all about everyone defining for themselves what’s best is that, as feminist organizer Jo Freeman wrote, the only ones who ever actually benefit are the connected, the privileged and the cunning. History bears out that, in a white supremacist society, those individuals are most assuredly white, and, in a women’s grouping, such are generally white women.
Because we have Western epistemology, some think freedom is being able define our realities. Yet if our realties and dreams are dictated to us by a colonial mentality, then you are asking only to empower yourself in the market. Thus you are only fortifying what you claim to be destroying. Without a thorough understanding of how capital functions in the lives of women and actively rejecting that, one merely supports a set of values already in existence.
There are certainly issues with conceptualizing self-interest in a world governed by the values of consumer capitalism where people frequently are alienated from their genuine self-interest—where personal identity is based more on what you consume than on what you believe, on your relationships with brands rather than your relationships with people. There often is some degree of false consciousness in how perceive our self-interest; the institutions of capitalism may present us with artificial divisions that make our self-interest seem to conflict with that of another group. So in choosing our priorities in activism based on what our self-interest appears to be, some caution and a great deal of self-examination are necessary—”Check your premises!”, as Ayn Rand often exhorted her readers. There’s no question that all activists should be listening to one another’s voices and re-evaluating their priorities on the basis of what we hear—oppression, as I have written before, is a transcendent concept; everyone experiences it differently, and no one can claim to know the whole of it.
But, ultimately, what other means do we have to choose where we direct our energies as activists, other than our personally determined self-interest? If we reject our own judgment, with whose do we replace it? No matter how attentive we strive to be to critiques from people who experience oppression in contexts different from our own, we as individuals still each have to make our own call on how to deal with it. The only alternative is that the individual in question stops thinking for herself and lets the judgment of some leader replace her own—and isn’t that sort of power dynamic exactly what liberals, feminists, and all activists are supposed to be resisting in the first place? Is a feminism that requires women to put aside their own values and priorities for the sake of “the movement” really any more useful than a patriarchy that requires women to put aside their own values and priorities for the sake of “the family” or “the society”?
So to Aguilar, I’d say the following: First of all, please do keep challenging the beliefs of people like the SlutWalk activists and encouraging them to have more challenging conversations about sexism and its intersections with other power dynamics. Because you’re right—that is how we all come to a deeper understanding of oppression. But the rhetoric of self-interest and personal judgment as inherently suspicious just isn’t a valuable part of that conversation. Since we as liberal radicals generally reject the idea of an institutional morality imposed above, our own personal judgment—which, of course, should be informed by those conversations with other activists—is all we have to rely on in making these choices. When bloggers go around shaming other activists for the unavoidable fact that the strategies they pursue are those that have personal impact, who does that serve? What does more shame, more guilt achieve, other than an activist base too de-energized and de-motivated by internal conflict to work for any change at all?
The personal really is the political. Activists of all backgrounds need to trust the personal—because, ultimately, the personal is all any individual has.
Reclaiming Rand 