Politics -- Alternative Feminisms

This is another seminar paper. Same caveat regarding the footnotes - I don't use endnotes (unless required to). This makes it easy to follow the notes when they're on separate pages, but a pain in the neck to do it when they're cut and pasted online. Too bad; I'm lazy. So, it's... Page 1...Footnotes for Page 1. Page 2...Footnotes for Page 2. Etc.





INTRODUCTION

In the introduction to the chapter on feminism in their anthology on literary theory1, Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan illustrate the inherent tension between utilizing the commonality (strength in numbers), while maintaining the uniqueness, of groups that have similar though not identical goals/beliefs. As Rivkin and Ryan put it: “If the student of literature in the early 1970s was moved to ask why is there not a feminist criticism, the student of literary theory in the late 1990s might well be moved to shift the emphasis and ask but why is there not a feminist criticism?”
There is a variety of possible definitions for “feminism” (which in and of itself is a problem), but for the purposes of this paper, I will go with “[t]he doctrine – and the political movement based on it – that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men.”2 The tension arises from the fact that different people have different ideas about both what constitutes equality and what the preferred means of bringing equality about are. Related questions include: 1) How much emphasis should be placed on consensus, and how much on coalition? And 2) How much support/credibility/respect should be given to group X’s vision of feminism by group Y, whose vision is conflicting? There is sometimes an uneasy alliance, at best, between competing views. I will use the term “mainstream feminism” to refer to the views or versions of feminism most embraced in the academic community and most brought-to-


1. JULIE RIVKIN & MICHAEL RYAN, Introduction: “Feminist Paradigms”, in LITERARY THEORY: AN ANTHOLOGY 527, 527 (1998).
2. THE AMERICAN HERITAGE NEW DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL LITERACY (3d ed. 2005).






mind in the lay community by the term “feminism.” The general consensus about what “feminism” is, in other words.
Perhaps the feminist group most excluded from the mainstream is the libertarian feminist group. Two anecdotes may serve to illustrate the point. First, I would refer to the (virtually identical) response I received from several different people upon telling
them that I was writing a paper on libertarian feminism. Essentially, the majority (albeit not unanimous) response was something like, “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” As we shall see, it is not; libertarian feminism has a long history, and the principles of libertarianism are entirely consistent with achieving the goals of feminism.
The second illustration of libertarianism’s tenuous membership in the feminist community is the well-accepted, interrelationship between feminism and critical race studies. For instance, at the UCLA School of Law, papers written in the “Feminist Legal Theory” or “Feminist Legal Philosophy” seminar may satisfy the writing requirement for the Critical Race Studies concentration.3 Conversely, a fair amount of time during the Feminist Legal Theory course I took was spent on matters of intersectionality (the synergistic effects of being in multiply-discriminated-against groups; in this case, race, gender, and occasionally sexual orientation) and race in general. This observation is not intended to be normative, but descriptive; it seems clear that the mutual relevance of critical race studies and feminism is generally accepted, and the disciplines appeal to many of the same people.4 This observation relates to libertarian feminism in that

3. http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=1086
4. The Feminist Legal Theory course incorporated the emphasis on race theory in response to strong student demand.






libertarianism appears to be firmly at odds with critical race studies, a discipline whose
scholars have “rejected individual rights and formal equality.”5 It is somewhat curious that mainstream feminism has largely rejected libertarian feminism, which has as its sole emphasis combating oppression against women, while embracing the feminism/race theory hybrid which, though it is uniquely capable of addressing concerns specific to minority women, may nevertheless undermine purely feminist concerns when they conflict with racial ones.6

HISTORY AND THEORY

As it turns out, however, although one might take entire college courses in feminist theory or listen to dozens of sound bites from mainstream feminist spokespeople without ever suspecting a plausible feminism/libertarian connection, libertarian feminism has a long and rich history on more than one continent. Joan Kennedy Taylor’s definitive book7 emphasizes this “surprise factor”: In a book that devotes roughly 45% of its pages
to history, and another 45% to policy issues, the only chapter that fits neither category is


5. From a UCLA School of Law mass E-mail promoting Critical Race Studies coursework. Amusingly, a revised and much more mainstream-sounding E-mail, making no mention of “rejecting individual rights,” went out less than four hours later.
6. See, e.g.,
7. JOAN KENNEDY TAYLOR, RECLAIMING THE MAINSTREAM: INDIVIDUALIST FEMINISM REDISCOVERED (Prometheus Books 1992). Recommended by Sharon Presley, National Coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, for which I am particularly grateful.








first – “So You Think You’re Not a Feminist?”8
Taylor wastes no time in clearly and succinctly staking out the counter-intuitive position in a single paragraph that should be required reading, at least as acknowledgement that such counter-positions exist, in any mainstream-oriented course on feminism:
I am a believer in individualism and individual rights; in entrepreneurship and free enterprise; in civil liberties and minimal government. And I am a feminist. Does that surprise anyone? I am convinced that there are many people who would basically agree with me if they didn’t have a soundbite image of what feminism entails.9

Although I strongly agree with Taylor’s position, I do not find problematic the fact that it is not advocated in mainstream feminist academia; I do, however, find problematic that it is not acknowledged as a position advocated by at least a fair minority of rigorously intellectual academics and prolific writers.
Who is this fair minority, where did they come from, and how long have they been around? Taylor10, as well Dr. Stephen Davies11, look back over 200 years, to Mary Wollstonecraft and some of her contemporaries. While Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally taken to represent the beginnings of feminism as a whole, Dr. Davies points out that Wollstonecraft, like Mary Hays (author of Appeal to The Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1799)), “defined the oppression of women in individual terms, as the denial of self realisation (sic) and self ownership to

8. Id. at 9.
9. Id. at 10.
10. Id. at 30.
11. DR. STEPHEN DAVIES, Libertarian Feminism in Britain, 1860-1910, Libertarian Alliance Pamphlet No. 7 (Libertarian Alliance/British Association of Libertarian Feminists joint publication, 1987).







individual women,” in contrast to radical feminists “who define female oppression in collective terms as the oppression of women as a group through patriarchy,” and socialist feminists, who see oppression as “an inevitable part of the system of capitalism.”12
Early feminists were largely united on some issues, and thus those issues are not academically interesting or useful with respect to a particular examination of libertarian feminism. For example, early feminists, regardless of how one might classify them, supported women’s suffrage, equal employment opportunities, and equal educational opportunities (though perhaps a distinction could be made with respect to the “more libertarian” efforts by groups such as the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, which engaged in proactive self-help activities such as job training, and activists such as Emily Davies and Emily and Maria Shirreff, who again vigorously embraced a self-help model and are credited with creating institutions such as Girton College and the Womens’ (sic) Educational Union).13
There are, however, other beliefs more relevant to the isolation and examination of libertarianism. For example, laws deemed married women unable to hold property (husband and wife were legally one person). Nineteenth century feminists’ attempts to establish property rights for women “arose out of their libertarian view of individual rights as necessarily dependent upon the existence of property rights.”14 Early libertarian feminists took the espoused beliefs of liberal philosophers (in the historical context, “liberal” is being used in its classic sense; that is to say, akin to liberalism as



12. Id.
13. Id.
14. Id.








opposed to today’s collectivist connotation), and applied them more consistently.15
Meanwhile, in the United States, a group of similarly-minded individualists was also developing along similar philosophical lines. Their ideas were first expressed in book form by Margaret Fuller, who in 1845 wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller noted that women were “placed at a legal and social disadvantage and usually not educated to develop [their] true talents,” a position that appears to state the obvious; however, her claim that their “interests were identical with [men’s],” and that men “could never read his true proportions” while women “remained in any wise shorn” of hers, seems decades ahead of its time.16 This observation would appear to echo the thoughts of renowned classical liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, who argued that inhibiting the freedom of women indirectly harmed the freedom of men to engage in optimal social and intellectual interaction.17 The only problem with this reading is that it can hardly be said of Fuller that she echoes Mill, when she predated his On The Subjection of Women by 25 years!
Some women who never adopt the term “feminist” or think of themselves as feminists nonetheless may espouse values that lead others to consider them as such. Rand, in Taylor’s eyes,
“epitomized…the feminist idea. She never considered her ambitions limited by the fact that she was a woman; she was independent enough to leave the Soviet Union and come to the United States by herself after she left the university; she intended to become a writer in a language and a country that were foreign to her – and she became a best-selling author. Her heroines were independent , achieving women like herself – in many respects role models for feminists.”


15. Id.
16. Taylor, supra note 7, at 33.
17. Davies, supra note 11.
18. Taylor, supra note 7, at 23-24.








Interestingly, Taylor notes, Rand did not support Ronald Reagan as a presidential candidate despite numerous political agreements, such as free market capitalism and a strong opposition to communism, because in her view, anyone (like Reagan) “who didn’t understand a woman’s right to choose abortion didn’t understand individual rights.”19 Rand also warmly welcomed Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, seeing ideas “that women possessed a fundamentally different nature from men or that they should sacrifice themselves for the good of men, society or the state” as “simply variations of the fundamental evil of collectivism, socialism and irrationalism.”20
More recently, the libertarian/feminist nexus has been advanced by the Association of Libertarian Feminists, founded in 1973 at the home of its first National Coordinator, Tonie Nathan. Nathan was also the first woman in United States history to receive an electoral vote (beating Geraldine Ferraro by more than a decade) when Virginia elector Roger MacBride, pledged to Nixon, went renegade. The purpose of the Association of Libertarian Feminists is to: 1) encourage economically self-sufficient and psychologically independent; 2) publicize and promote realistic attitudes toward female competence, achievement, and potential; 3) oppose the abridgement of individual rights by any government on account of sex; 4) work toward changing sexist attitudes and behavior exhibited by individuals; and 5) provide a libertarian alternative to those aspects of the women’s movement that tend to discourage independence and individuality.21 This year, the Association of Libertarian Feminists co-sponsored a conference entitled

19. Id. at 24
20. Davies, supra note 11 n.14.
21. http://www.alf.org/index.shtml







“Autonomy in The Family.” The conference emphasized encouraging critical thinking and self-esteem among young people, and egalitarian marriage.
This very brief historical overview is obviously not intended to provide a comprehensive look at the libertarian feminist movement, but rather to briefly demonstrate that there is a long history of intertwined libertarian and feminist thought. Furthermore, those principles or policies are, in fact, clearly “feminist” in nature.

SELECTED DIRECT COMPARISONS BETWEEN FEMINISMS

The exclusion of libertarian feminism from mainstream feminist discourse is ironic, because, due to their natures, mainstream feminism needs libertarian feminism for reasons that are not reciprocal. By its nature, libertarian feminism is centered on a moral recognition of the fundamental nature of individual rights. For this reason, a course on libertarian feminism has no particular need to invoke collectivist feminist principles as a basis for comparison; ultimately, libertarian feminism is not utilitarian. It may be that enacting specific policies based on libertarian feminism would have utilitarian benefits, but that would be ancillary to their essential justification – the respect for basic individual freedom. In this sense, libertarian feminism is more “principled” in the literal sense – there is a principle at work for the libertarian feminist that is more important than the weighing of pros and cons.
The reverse, however, cannot be true. Mainstream collectivist feminism is, at its essence, a utilitarian ideal. Mainstream feminists have no competing ideal other than, hopefully, to find the philosophy/doctrines/policies that most effectively secure the same economic, political, and social rights as men. I make this distinction as a purely descriptive one; my only point in doing so is to suggest that given this goal, mainstream feminism at its core should require inquiry into competing feminist views for the purpose of ascertaining whether one view might in fact be superior. They do not have luxury of saying, as a libertarian feminist might, “I don’t care if your way leads to more desirable outcomes; I’m operating on a principle that is more important than the end result.” I do not actually suggest that libertarian feminists take this view; rather, I strongly suspect that they believe that the doctrines and policies that are consistent with their philosophies, by and large, are actually the ones that lead to the preferred end results.
The only plausible response, from the perspective of an advocate of mainstream feminism, to the position that mainstream feminism’s nature demands comparison with other views is the response, “Yes, of course, and we have looked at these individualist perspectives and found that they are not at good at producing the outcomes we desire.” That response is a fair one; however, particularly in the legal theory field, as news situations and problems arise, the comparison needs to be reexamined periodically. The horizon constantly changes, and models that are preferable with respect to one set of problems are not necessarily preferable with respect to another. Furthermore, in the realm of academia, although career professors may have at one time made the comparisons and drawn the conclusions in favor of mainstream feminism, they teach constantly-changing groups of students. These students need to make the same comparisons and draw their own conclusions, not be given a solely collectivist model with the unspoken message that it embodies all that feminism is or may be.
A further justification for the inclusion of libertarian feminism in the discourse of feminism generally is that, at least in the eyes of the free market capitalist feminists22, competition is a good thing. A unilateral view of any subject, particularly one that is advanced by academic discourse, runs a risk common in instances of “preaching to the choir” – that a well-received message will not be subject to the full, appropriate degree of intellectual scrutiny. Let us move out of the abstract and into the concrete…
In the Feminist Legal Theory course I took, the following chart was presented:

RACE AND GENDER INTERACTIVE EFFECTS ON SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS

Economic Status ($)
Educational Status (yrs)
White Males
16,467
12.7
Black Males
9,448
12.2
White Females
6,949
12.6
Black Females
6,164
12.2

Income figures are 1984 median incomes for those fifteen years or older. Educational attainment is for 1984, median years of school completed.
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987).23



A cursory explanation of the data is in order. First, as explained by the author of the article for which the chart was reproduced: “Table 1 presents the varied and conditional influence of race and gender and, presumably, of racism and sexism on

22. That’s a joke.
23. King, supra note 6.









socioeconomic and educational status…While gender is more critical in understanding black women’s income ranking, race is more important in explaining their level of educational attainment.”24
Toril Moi wrote that Simone de Beauvoir helped her “to remember that the aim of feminism is to abolish itself.”25 I did not believe that when I read it, and I still don’t particularly believe it. The reason for that is related to the explanation of what should be a relatively simple 2-variable statistical analysis. More on that shortly.
King’s major point is well taken – with respect to some issues, race may be a more useful predictor than sex in predicting the status of black women (in this case, race is more closely correlated with education than sex is; that is to say, black women are more similar to black men than to white women in terms of education), and with respect to other issues, sex may be the more useful prediction (in this case, income; black women are more similar to white women than to black men with respect to income).
Correlation studies essentially do one thing – they show you whether two variables are related to each other. They also tell you to what extent the variables are related, but that’s about it. They do not, however, tell you that one variable is causing another. Generally, some form of controlled experiment needs to be done to successfully demonstrate causation. From the limited information obtained in a study of correlation, there are simply too many other possibilities than to assert that A caused B. It could be that B caused A; it could be that a third variable, C, which we don’t have any information

24. Id.
25. TORIL MOI, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman 213 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).









about, caused both A and B. And so on. In this case, for instance, King’s blithe supposition that the cited data “presumably” show the influence “of racism and sexism” is almost entirely unsupported. The best one could say about her assertion and the data is that they are not inconsistent, but that’s a far cry from presuming racism and sexism in an academic paper. It could be, for instance, that black women are more likely than white women to become pregnant as teenagers, and thus drop out of school, thus explaining the gap in educational achievement as easily as racism would. That King feels entirely comfortable essentially making up an explanation for the data and dropping into an article that appeared not only in an academic journal, but later in more than ten anthologies26 is, partly, what leads me to distrust Moi’s assertion. I have observed too much of a desire to minimize gains and exaggerate (or ascribe where perhaps none exist) injustices27 to believe that, for the most part, the mainstream of the feminist movement has any desire to abolish itself. There is a largely unchallenged emphasis on finding and maximizing examples of discrimination that would not so easily exist in an environment also largely populated by those feminists who emphasize a model of self-help and capability rather than one of victimhood.
When the data were discussed in class, two noteworthy things happened. The first was that the professor noted (quite correctly) that it appeared from the data that black

26. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~socy/faculty/king.html
27. A disclaimer is in order here, since I will be shortly taking a critical look at data analysis. My assertion is nothing more than one person’s anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence seems to find a friendlier audience in matters of feminist theory than in many other disciplines, so any reader is welcome to ascribe to it whatever measure of relevance he or she believes is appropriate. The key is, I am not trying to mask my anecdote as scientific proof of anything. Although it is only an anecdotal conclusion, I will share a few of the great many things I have read or heard that have led me to it.









women suffered less from sexism than white women do, with respect to income. In other
words, controlling for race, we see that black women earn about 2/3 as much as their
male counterparts, while white women earn less than half of their male counterparts.
That observation seems quite non-controversial, but that’s when it got interesting.
First, the professor followed up the comment about black women’s suffering less from sexism than white women (remember, the comment was that it appeared to be so) by pointing out that we do not know from the data whether the difference could be ascribed to the number of hours worked. For example, it could be that black women seem to be closer to equality with men because they work 50% more hours than white women do. This observation, too, is entirely consistent with the information given, but it in turn leads to two points. First, notice that the professor did not point out the logical corollary to this point – if the number of hours worked have not been controlled-for, then the data is also meaningless from the standpoint of showing that women are worse off than men. That is to say, maybe white men earn 74% more than white women only because they work 74% more hours. If we don’t have any information about whether the data are controlled for number of hours worked, that has as much of an implication for the reported differences between men and women as it does for the reported differences between white women and black women. That disclaimer, however, was never raised, and apparently unnoticed by any of the other students, although when it came to the racially-related distinction between white women and black women, it was mentioned twice.
The dynamic at work here is not difficult to understand. With apologies to Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, you’ve got to…accentuate the negative…eliminate the positive. The course, as it turned out, was for all intents and purposes as concerned with racial matters as with sex-based ones. Thus, evidence suggesting sexism (the data reflecting the income disparities between men and women) should be unchallenged; evidence minimizing racism, however (the data reflecting that, as compared with white women, black women do more than 54% better as measured against their respective male counterparts) must be de-emphasized.
The second interesting thing that happened during the discussion of the King data was that one student in the class refused to accept the professor’s observation that black women appeared to suffer the effects of sexism less than white women. You may recall that I noted this comment seemed non-controversial. The student in question was one of the most vocal, an older student who was one of the more vocal proponents of finding and decrying evidence of racism, sexism, and sexual-orientation-ism at all opportunities. More interestingly, she holds a graduate degree in a major which I am 99% sure is a behavioral science that requires coursework in behavioral statistics. The professor’s point was not remotely mathematically challenging, and, in fact, it could be explained to someone who knew almost nothing at all about math. There are only two variable – race and sex. The idea is to eliminate one of them so that we can compare apples to apples. When you compare apples to apples, you see that black men earn about half again as much as black women, while white men earn more than double what white women earn. In an amazing case of what we in the legal business call “willful blindness,” the fairly clear observation that in this one tiny respect, it’s not so bad to be black ended a couple of minutes later with agreement-to-disagree.
One common tool some mainstream feminists use to silence the contrary opinions of libertarian feminists is to simply co-opt the term “feminist” altogether and simply attempt to exclude those with a libertarian slant. One notable icon who made apt use of this rhetorical tool was Andrea Dworkin. For instance, Dworkin wrote, “One pro-pornography “feminist” published an article in which she said I was anti-abortion, this in the face of decades of work for abortion rights and membership in many pro-choice groups.”28 As pornography has nothing to do with Dworkin’s support of abortion rights, it is clearly raised in an effort to undermine her enemy’s credibility; the same can be said of enclosing the word “feminist” in quotes. The implication is clear: Here is a detractor who calls herself a feminist, but how can she be a “real” feminist, anyway, when she’s pro-pornography? No wonder Joan Kennedy Taylor noted, in response to the public comments of numerous feminists in the wake of the Senate Judiciary Committee investigation on the allegations by Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas, that “[y]ou would have no hint that the issue of banning pornography has been a subject of deep division within the feminist community.”29
Again, with respect to another individual with whose beliefs Dworkin disagreed, she wrote, “Havelock Ellis, considered a feminist by scholars in the male tradition…”30 (emphasis added). This one is particularly nice. Ellis is not really a feminist; he’s just considered a feminist. Furthermore, he’s just considered a feminist by scholars in the

28. ANDREA DWORKIN, Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea, in LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE (1993).
29. Taylor, supra note 7, at 9.
30. ANDREA DWORKIN, PORNOGRAPHY: MEN POSSESSING WOMEN 55 (Plume 1991) (1979).









male tradition (presumably the tradition least able to ascertain just who should be
considered a feminist). These types of bush-league credibility attacks should not have a place in any academic forum. If a point you disagree with is weak; refute it. If it is strong, explain to the satisfaction of your reader/listener why yours is better. Responding to people whose views differ from yours with, “Well, you’re not really a feminist” is a cheap tactic, but one more likely to succeed (Dworkin’s status is legendary in mainstream feminist circles) the more homogenous the audience is – possibly to the benefit of the speaker, but almost never to the benefit of the discipline.
Pornography is an interesting and useful topic around which to frame a comparison of mainstream and libertarian feminism, because it offers both points of agreement and points of disagreement, both between the two philosophies and within each. With regard to the latter, for instance, one could be a libertarian feminist who is very much opposed to pornography but nonetheless does not feel that the government has any right to coercively oppose it; on the other hand, one could feel that there is nothing at all wrong with pornography.31 It would be ironic in the worst way if, after railing against mainstream feminism’s somewhat egocentric view of itself as “the” feminism, I then suggested that there were only one libertarian feminism. For the purposes of this comparison, I will rely heavily on Joan Kennedy Taylor’s view for two reasons: 1) She is acknowledged as a leading voice in the libertarian feminist movement, and 2) Her views

31. See, e.g., http://www.anniesprinkle.org/html/about/voices.html for views from one of the influential voices in the sex-positive feminism movement. While Andrea Dworkin doubtless would have been either amused or disgusted (or some combination thereof) by the notion of Annie Sprinkle as a feminist, Sprinkle, unlike Dworkin is at least willing to recognize that “there are many different kinds of feminists,” including those members of Women Against Porn whose views are diametrically opposed to her own.








on the topic are fairly moderate.
The mainstream feminist community is fairly unilaterally anti-pornography. This opposition can different forms, primarily dependent upon how much government coercion one is willing to bring to bear in the anti-pornography movement, from very much (strict criminal penalties) to some (civil liability) to almost none (education and boycott efforts aimed at citizen awareness and action. It is important, however, to distinguish between publicly espoused positions and actions. For example, the Meese Commision (formed at the behest of then-president Ronald Reagan to reexamine pornography more than a decade after a similar commission had “found no provable connection between pornography and criminal action and so had recommended that most laws against pornography be repealed”32) disclaimed “any interest in censorship,”33 but “suggested that the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act be used against suspected pornographers,”34 a distinction that prompted Taylor to write, “If this is not censorship, it looks like a duck and walks like a duck.”35 At least one example of RICO in action is worth mentioning: In United States v. Pryba,36 RICO forfeiture laws were used to seize “all shares of stock” in defendants’ corporations, as well as “corporate assets” and “certain real estate and motor vehicles,”37 effectively shutting down businesses that earned $2,000,000 in annual sales.38 The “justification” for

32. Taylor, supra note 7, at 210.
33. Id. at 212.
34. Id.
35. Id.
36. United States v. Pryba, 900 F.2d 748 (4th Cir. 1990).
37. Id. at 752.
38. Id. at 753.











the seizure was “the sale and rental of…$105.30 of material found to be obscene.”39 That’s one hell of a duck.
The libertarian feminist position is that the use of individual calls to action, boycotts, and the like is entirely appropriate. It is, after all, an expression of the libertarian fundamental values as property rights and freedom of association. Former editor of Reason Marty Zupan noted rhetorically that would be hypocritical to suggest that it was “virtuous” for grocery stores to pull non-union produce from their shelves in response to consumer pressure, but “un-American” for convenience stores to stop carrying Playboy and Penthouse in response to pressure from different consumers.40
While agreeing in principle with such non-coercive means, Taylor cautions against possible consequences. One of these concerns the lengths to which some anti-pornography political bedfellows will carry their efforts; for instance, “as part of the antipornography boycott the National Federation for Decency picketed a store in Tampa to get it to remove copies of National Lampoon and Mad” for promoting “rebellion against parental authority.”41 Another potential economic reality of boycotts is that they may hurt the small magazine distributor or retailer, which may have ripple effects reflected by the variety of magazines they are able to stock, while leaving huge publications relatively unharmed. Whether or not there is a causal link, it was around the time of the post-Meese-Commission hullabaloo that Playboy and Penthouse, with

39. Id.
40. MARTY ZUPAN, “Civil Libertarians Cry Wolf,” REASON, July 1986, 15.
41. Taylor, supra note 7, at 218.











reduced retail outlets for their magazines, expanded into the adult video business.42 Perhaps the most interesting takeaway point from the examination of a libertarian feminist perspective on pornography is that, in the same possibly-surprising way we find that some feminists are in favor of pornography, we also learn that some libertarian feminists are opposed to it, and quite willing and able to propose and critically analyze means to combat it, provided those means do not violate fundamental individualist rights.
Prostitution is another topic which merits use as a backdrop for a mainstream feminist/libertarian feminist comparison. A mainstream (albeit racially-loaded and exceedingly vitriolic) article on the topic was printed in the Hastings Women’s Law Journal and authored by Vednita Carter and Evelina Giobbe.43 The article, however, while clearly anti-libertarian, in many places makes points that would be fitting in a libertarian feminist journal, if only the authors drew the correct conclusions from their points and examples. As with pornography, there is clearly a great deal of room for common ground between the mainstream feminist position and the libertarian one. I have two major problems with the article, both of which center only on its conclusions and emphases.
Carter and Giobbe devote a great deal of space to describing the conditions that impel many women to become prostitutes and the dangers that they face upon entering into prostitution. As one would expect, these factors are in many cases horrific, such as childhood sexual abuse, poverty, and battery.44 The problem is that their paper “wags the

42. Id.
43. Vednita Carter & Evelina Giobbe, Duet: Prostitution, Racism and Feminist Discourse, 10 HASTINGS WOMEN’S L.J. 37 1999.
44. Id. at 43-44.












dog,” attacking those feminists who believe that legalization would be helpful to those women who have resorted to prostitution. If prostitution is a terrible institution (and surely many libertarian feminists would agree that it is), that fact is best used as evidence in an attack on sexual abuse or poverty. It is logical to claim that poverty and sexual abuse are evil partly because they impel women who would not otherwise do so to turn to prostitution; it is not logical to claim that prostitution is evil because people who experience adverse conditions turn to it.
Using a causal link between these factors and prostitution to advocate for stricter criminal penalties for sexual abuse or battery, or economic policies that would alleviate poverty, would undoubtedly reveal commonality between Carter & Giobbe and libertarian feminists.45 Battery and sexual abuse, for instance, are obvious and clear violations of a fundamental libertarian principle – bodily autonomy. Carter and Giobbe, however, spent most of their energy not attacking the involuntary (on their part) atrocities that put prostitutes in horrible positions, but rather the first autonomous decision – to engage in prostitution and hopefully earn some money and eventually improve their circumstances – they decide to make.
The second problem with the Carter/Giobbe piece is that it is not at all intellectually rigorous in distinguishing between problems associated with prostitution




45. It may very well be that they would not agree on what those economic policies would be, and if they did find common ground concerning the pragmatic question, it would still have to get by the libertarian feminists’ principle of respecting individual rights. However, there is nothing inherently contradictory about the possibility.










per se and problems associated specifically with the illegality of prostitution. Again, an
examination of this sort would likely have revealed some common ground with the libertarian feminist position. For example, the authors cite the statistic that “[o]ver half (52%) of prostituted women seeking services from the WHISPER program in 1995 had been psychically assaulted by a john and 40% by a pimp.”46 “These [physical attacks, robberies, and verbal abuse] are the commonplace insults to injury that are directed at prostitutes simply because they are prostitutes.”47 But are they really? Isn’t it at least possible that prostitutes face such astonishing rates of abuse not “simply because they are prostitutes,” but rather primarily because the government has proscribed their chosen occupation? It is not at all inconsistent with a libertarian feminist position to oppose assault, but where Carter and Giobbe stop the analysis at “prostitutes get beaten…prostitution is bad,” any libertarian feminist worth his or her weight in gold would ask, “If prostitutes weren’t inherently criminals, would those who assault them feel as free to do so?” and “Would prostitutes be more apt to seek help from law enforcement officials if it did not mean identifying themselves as criminals?” and “Would police officers protect the rights of prostitutes more vigorously if they were not marginalized by criminalization?”
The violence-associated-with-legality inquiry is not novel; the prohibition on the sale of alcohol gave rise to the first major crime wave of the last century. Now that it is
legal to sell alcohol, liquor store owners and whiskey distributors do not gun each other
down in the streets…but drug dealers do.

46. Carter & Giobbe, supra note 43, at 47 n49.
47. Id. at 47.








CONCLUSION


Libertarian feminism has a long and rich tradition. Its advocates believe as strongly as mainstream feminists in the fundamentally equal rights and value that women and men have. While they may disagree strongly with mainstream feminists on some policy issues, they share clear and strong areas of agreement even with respect to such intuitively divisive areas as pornography (boycott and public awareness) and prostitution (condemnation of those who would invade individual bodily autonomy). Despite their long history and commitment to women’s rights, however, libertarian feminists are likely to be excluded from the mainstream feminist community and its discourse, to the extent that university students and the lay public alike may not even know of their existence. This exclusion disserves both those students and the discipline of feminism itself. A Lexis search for “libertarian” within three words of “femin!” over the ten years reveals dozens of law review articles on such diverse topics as same-sex parental rights, reproductive rights, and tax policy. The arguments are out there, just waiting to be brought into the main discourse.
One comment I heard on more than one occasion from students in my Feminist Legal Theory course, from young women who strongly believed in “[t]he doctrine – and the political movement based on it – that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men.” (see page 1) was something like, “I really don’t even know if I’m a feminist.” This comment was generally followed by a disclaimer that the student was not a Marxist, or didn’t believe in affirmative action, or thought that it was OK to be a stay-at-home mom, if one wanted to. If I could say one thing to all of these students, and, doubtless, the thousands just like them nationwide, it’s this – Yes. You are ALL feminists. It’s a damn shame you don’t know it, but don’t let anyone tell you different.
Since I’ve spent a fair amount of time blasting Andrea Dworkin, both in this paper and elsewhere, I’d like to conclude with a quotation from her: “[W]omen are human to precisely the degree and quality that [men] are.”48 I agree unreservedly, and I doubt one could find a libertarian feminist able to say it better.




48. ANDREA DWORKIN, I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce in Which There is No Rape, in LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE (1993).