A Fairly Popular Feminist Blog/Power

A fairly popular feminist blog. That's what Wikipedia says about this blog. For a moment I felt tempted to change the description to: The Most Awesome Blog That Never Made A Wave, but I held my tongue, as usual.

Bloggers can play many different games. Blogs can be news bureaus or scandal-mongerers or philosophers or analysts or propagandists and so on. Some games have much larger rewards than others, and every blogger must decide what game she or he is playing. But all those games are about power. Even feminists bloggers wield power, whatever the popular culture says about women not wanting to have power.

Not that the power of bloggers is anything to crow about. Still, I'd like all women bloggers to accept the rights and responsibility of power better, and I should start with my divine self.

I once told a professor of mine that I didn't want to have any power over other people, just over my own life, and he pointed out that he thought this was not a feasible plan, because suppose that someone decided to kidnap me. What would I do then if I had no power over this other person? He had a point.

The discomfort many women have over the idea of wielding power is about power the way it's defined by the cruel dictators of history or of power as violence. That discomfort is also linked to the views of the ideal woman who is not manly or bossy or arrogant but somehow gets everybody to kiss her feet anyway. The romance genre in literature is an excellent example of the subversive type of power that many women seem to find quite acceptable. All the books end with the woman having tamed this aggressive man into happy submission, but he is not suffering, because he has selected his own submission. Love! It's power, too.

I'm uncomfortable with the sneakiness of that type of power, with the way a woman is traditionally expected to manipulate people into doing what she wants to happen. This is the power of the weak, and somehow it's never discussed in all those pop articles which tell us how women really don't want any power at all.

Feminists are not unaware of all these aspects of power. "Power-over" is a hierachical type of power, a bad type, and one which should be replaced by more democratic types of power. There's something to this idea. Hierarchical organizations which elect the head and then get rid of the head when he or she no longer carries out the tasks satisfactorily is a great improvement over inherited or violently acquired hierarchical power. But I'm not sure that we can dispense with all hierarchies and replace them with totally egalitarian decision-making. It's just too inefficient in larger organizations. This is a really bad discussion of "power-over" issues, but I'm too hot and bothered to research it right now, so I will let the paragraph stay. My astute commenters will sort it out.

To return to my topic, power in life cannot be avoided. If we refuse to use it someone else will. But this is not an antagonistic view of the world. We could use power the way we play ball as children: We receive it, we play with it, and we pass it on. Then it's returned to us.

Power is a relationship in our human world, and so power can be viewed from at least two angles. Analyzing these angles is useful. But it's also useful to remember that power in itself has no moral intentions. Power is not bad or good. It's the way we use it that defines its moral dimension, and the reason why what Hitler did was bad but that what Gandhi did was mostly good.

I'm waffling. To return to the beginning of this post: I was uncomfortable with the idea that this blog might have any popularity at all, and the reason was the way I view responsibility. If nobody reads me then I'm free to say anything I want. If people read me then I have to be careful. But I still want people to read me, for both purely egotistical reasons and because I want some issues to get more publicity.