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Beyond the Politics of Irony and Lip Gloss:
An Interview with Feminist Writer Katha Pollitt

by Jessica Clark
date 04.02.01

LiP: I was wondering about your critique of postfeminism. Do you think there are some current leaders or movements that show some promise, coming out of postfeminist publications like Bitch and Bust, now that people are turning 30 and having to face issues beyond lipstick questions and glam

Katha Pollitt: Actually, I talk about the zines a bit in the introduction to my new book…

Right.

I guess I want to be for them, to praise them, because I think it's always good when people are speaking for themselves, and I like it that it's not corporate-controlled or dominated media, and has a handmade feel. I know many young women who really like Bust. One of my students said that there is just so much negativity about femaleness, about being a woman out there, and Bust is so positive and cheerful that she loves it.

My own feeling is that the zines are all right as far as they go, but I wish that they would go a little farther. I don't see why every page has to be devoted to clothing and the critique thereof, movie stars and the critique thereof, forgettable novels and the critique thereof…and salted with autobiographical stories that are not really of great interest to very many people.

For me, information is the key to life, and I think that information is very much what people do not have enough of at this moment in time. I would like the zines a lot more if at least one article an issue was devoted to some actual political or feminist subject about, you know, what you should do if you're sexually harassed, what the issues are surrounding legal abortion… [for example] people say that abortion causes psychological trauma; why do they say that, and what is the truth?

I think that the zines in a funny way mirror the magazines they make fun of, because they have the same set of concerns as the mainstream women's magazines: sex, boys, clothes, your body. I think that there's more to life than that.

I was asking just because I've recently been pleased to see, at least in Bitch, a lot more in-depth features and interviews of people like bell hooks. I'm about the same age, and I'm seeing some people maturing, becoming mothers, getting married, and starting to confront some of the non-twentysomething issues.

Well, a zine I like very much is Hip Mama, which I think is much more about the nitty-gritty of life, with a great spirit and wonderful politics.

What about rising feminist activists, women who are in their 20s and early 30s and trying to incorporate some of the critiques of Second Wave feminism, but actually going out and creating a ruckus, or doing something new. Do you know of any examples?

Well, Third Wave, I think they see themselves as doing what you're talking about. I'm actually in a little group called History in Action, which is supposed to be intergenerational feminism. We have women all the way from 75 to in their 20s, but it is true that after awhile the young women want to go off and do their own thing.

To me it feels like things are stagnating in feminism.

I have a little bit of the same feeling. What I do see is that there are some very interesting young women who are working at places like the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy. I've had a few students who worked there, and I would really like to think that there were all of these exciting young women's organizations—I think that there may be some, but they're pretty small still. I think there's stuff going on on campus around reproductive rights.

Where do you teach?

I was teaching at the New School in the graduate program in liberal studies—a class in feminist texts.

On a different tack, I was wondering if you could give us your perspective on alternative/left media. It seems that it is shrinking or being pressed from the outside by commercial interests, like what's happening at Pacifica, and some things that have happened here in Chicago at Streetwise. I'm wondering if that's been affecting The Nation at all, or if you've seen The Nation change over the past couple of years with the hypercommercialization of media.

Well, I think it would be hard to argue that The Nation is running after a larger circulation. It's had pretty much the same circulation for some time, about 95,000. The kinds of ads it gets are not the kinds that affect content, like ads from drug companies that mean that you can't publish the article about how the drugs don't work.

I think that some of the ways in which The Nation has tried to be less of a marginal publication are good, like we have a Web site now, and just recently the site has started to have original content. I think that's really great. So, I guess I'm working towards answering your question with a "no". I don't feel that—whatever is happening with The Nation—I don't think it has to do with that particular phenomena, of having to respond to or ward off commercialization.

So what do you think is happening at The Nation?

Well, I think The Nation, unfortunately, has decided to have its major intellectual problem be "what should our relationship to the Democratic party be?" It's like, has anyone told the Democratic party that The Nation is wondering about this relationship? Do they care? It's a little bit of the tail wagging the dog, or tail thinking that it could wag the dog, when in fact, the dog is running off in another field.

…being fed treats by somebody else.

Yeah.

A related question: in a couple of the essays, you express some frustrations about both the hypocrisy of the left in terms of speaking about but not doing things, and also the self-limiting universe of both Nation readers and writers—in terms of race, in terms of class—I'm wondering...do you think the situation is hopeless? Is this the perpetual state of the left, to be upper-middle-class, white, educated, and somewhat isolated? Or are you seeing some cross-pollination?

I think that there are a lot of people in every social class who will be interested in the left when it seems like the left can actually accomplish something.

I sometimes think that you are never going to get a lot of people signing up for left-wing politics, or even "progressive" politics as long as there's a very strong economy. Its true that a lot of people are not doing well; it's a myth that everyone is doing well. But enough people are doing well, and more than that, enough people think that they are going to be doing well, that they are not going to want to spend a lot of energy on projects that are going to raise their taxes, or that mean that they can't have great big SUVs, that kind of thing.

Now, with the stock market going down, who knows? The left could be in for a big revival. But I really think that the percentage of people in this country that are really interested in politics is very small. I think it's true that people are pretty alienated. They don't vote, they don't read the newspaper…maybe they watch the TV news, but mostly that's just murders, car crashes, and gossip. So, I think that for people to become more interested in politics, it would have to seem a lot more practical. It has to seem like, "If I become interested in this, I can actually use it to make a change that I want."

The question then becomes, in an entertainment-saturated populace, how do you convince people that what is practical is not boring? How do you entice people to see the practicality in political action?

Part of me wants to say that maybe those other people are right—that it isn't very practical to be a leftist right now, and that's why the people who are leftists tend to be university students and upper-middle-class people, and working class people fit into it a different way…they're union organizers, they're plugged in on issues like race.

…at points in their lives where they can actually see the impact or disparities.

Right…also, I was going to say, most people are working pretty hard. When you talk about entertainment, you have to think, "Well, when are people indulging in all of this frivolous entertainment consumption?" It's after they come home from their two jobs, after they put the kids to bed. Most people don't have a lot of leisure for activities that are both not fun and seem pointless…and it's kind of hard to argue with them.

Definitely. I guess that's where the the mediated moral scandal comes in…it's entertaining, and people also get to feel involved politically, whether it's about Eminem, or the OJ Simpson trial, which you wrote a lot about in the book.

Well, these are spectacles, and people find them fun to watch. They seem to dramatize various conflicts and nightmares of our society, so they're interesting in that way.

But it's always interesting to me that…you take the public schools. Now, you would think that this is an issue that everyone could get together on. My daughter's in public school, and she goes to one of the better ones—by public school standards, pretty good. But they don't have the resources of private schools. Then, you go a few steps below that, and it's a nightmare.

You would think that this is the perfect issue for people to be radicalized around: it's very immediate, you don't have to have read a whole lot of Karl Marx to think that your child should have a teacher who can teach the kids to read, and all the rest of it, and yet there really isn't that much going on around it. There is a bit. ACORN is a very active group in New York…they did excellent work in Brooklyn—and these are all working-class people—in which they tested the access of black and Hispanic children to gifted and talented programs. They would send white people and black people, and what they found is that the white parents got a welcome, and the black parents were told, "oh, it's too late, you can't apply." It was just completely naked discrimination.

I think that was a very valuable service, and the next thing that should happen is general outrage. But this is not happening on the scale you would expect.

It would be interesting to know why that was; I don't know what the answer is. Is it that people understand that, in fact, the Board of Ed in New York City is a completely impenetrable bureaucratic dictatorship, and they're not going to get anything out of it, or what?

I'll tell you one thing: I've decided I want to be more of an activist, and my group, History in Action, which is supposed to be an activist group…it took us four months to put on one abortion speakout. It's really hard to do these things!

Is it the group dynamics?

It is partially the group dynamics—people working together who don't always know each other well, and a lot of it is done over email, which is a very volatile medium. It's partly that we had to find the money, and there were logistics…activism is really tough, really difficult. Look at local community groups who spend years trying to get a traffic light at a dangerous crossroad.

It comes back to this question I had about boredom, but it's also about immediacy. People don't have a lot of patience now for things that seem ponderous and analog. So, people like me who have been part of the "information revolution"—which may or may not be failing now, at least as a business strategy—have tried to use email and the Web to speed things up, to make things seem hipper and more interesting. I'm just not sure if that's the answer.

I think that the Web has resulted in a proliferation of ways to think that you are doing something, when in fact you are only sending an email.

I'm always sending emails to my elected representatives and others through various Web sites like the ACLU and NOW and the Feminist Majority, and I even belong to something called Progressivesecretary.org, which offers letters on every lefty topic under the sun. They are very well researched…they send you the email, and you say "send," or "don't send," and off it goes. But I do sometimes wonder, since I recently read that our senators and representatives are totally swamped by email: do they read these things?

No.

So, you can see how you get a sense of doing something without really doing something.

So what would really doing something look like? Writing a paper letter?

OK, if you write a paper letter, someone is going to read it.

Here's another example: cyberwar. Cyberwar was a plan of a few years ago to use email and the Internet to achieve political goals by, for example, on a particular day having everyone email the Mexican government with pro-Zapatista messages, and this would cause their email system to break. And yet, the Mexican government seems to be doing just fine—a lot better than the Zapatistas are. So you just wonder how much of this works. The technology that lets you do it…well, they have technology also, so then they can make a little email box and all your messages go into that.

I think maybe there aren't so many shortcuts. These things that you call "analog" and "boring" can work. The Web seems so magical that it seems you ought to be able to eat, sleep, and get married with the computer, but I just don't know if it's really going to add up to that much.

I will say that it's an excellent way to inform people. There have been some wonderful things that have happened through email that could not have happened another way. For example, a lot of the Seattle organizing was done over the Internet, a lot of the anti-NAFTA stuff.

Recently there was an email that went around, originating in a column by Pat Morrison, who is a California newspaper columnist, suggesting that people send money to a pro-choice organization in George Bush's name for President's Day. Planned Parenthood got half a million dollars! Other groups got money too. I received this email about a hundred times. So, I think that there are some ways in which the difference in communication is great; that is something that could not have been organized in another way.

Finally: what has George Bush done so far that has made you the angriest?

Oh, well, there's so much competition! Everything he's done is just so terrible. I think that the faith-based initiative is going to be very disastrous, and what makes me very angry is that there are good liberal and progressive people who don't see that.

I think the temptation is to go for the quick fix. This is what really bothers me about the left—this mindset of, "Well, people don't really like us. People are conservative and religious. If we were more conservative and religious, maybe they'd like us more." So you get this fairly cynical move to embrace things that our politics really are not about.

This faith-based initiative stuff…the idea that the government is going to be giving money to all these shysters for these programs that everyone seems very willing to believe work when there is no evidence that they do. For example, The Nation's legal correspondent David Cole wrote an article on the New York Times op ed page in which he said faith based initiatives were great, we shouldn't be afraid of it…look at Teen Challenge; 80 percent of their drug addicts get reformed. Well, where does this number come from? It comes from Teen Challenge!

There's no peer review of these things. Nobody calls up five of these people five years later and says, "Well, have you taken any drugs lately?" That's true for AA also; I think AA is a wonderful organization, which does not need any faith-based money because it is completely volunteer-led, but they do not even know what the success rate is. How would you? People come, they go, you'd really have to design a study. It's really hard to do, and I don't think AA is particularly interested in doing it.

There's just this eagerness to find something that people will like.

...and to not be marginalized.

Right, but they'll be marginalized anyway. The sort of liberal preachers that are in favor of this, like Jim Wallis…Jim Wallis is not some major religious figure with a congregation of hundreds of thousands; he's like The Nation, another small liberal entrepreneur. I would just think that for Jim Wallis to embrace George Bush so that he can get a couple of thousand dollars…to me, this is not very dignified.

It also reinforces the idea that you can't say anything negative about religion.

Yes, and it also obscures the unfortunate fact that religion has not had a happy history with relation to modernity in a lot of ways. For example: reproductive rights. Jim Wallis is pro-life; he doesn't talk about it much, but that's what he is. I wouldn't want hiss organization running the teen shelter.

And there's nobody to monitor these programs.

Nobody! Nobody's going monitor them, and even though you're supposed to keep separate books, nobody's going to monitor that either.

Besides, how can you have a smaller government when you have create more positions to manage a new bureaucracy?

Exactly. It's just a giveaway, an enormous boondoggle for anyone who can call themselves religious. Most of the churches that will actually go after this money will be quite conservative, and I'm not for that.

Is there anything you'd like to say about the book?

I had a lot of fun putting this book together because it was already written, and I had an interesting time writing the introduction about feminism at the millennium. It's one of those glass-half-full/glass-half-empty questions: how far have women come?

It's so interesting to me that so many features of the lives of women have changed since I was in college, and yet the social subordination of women, transfigured in certain ways, persists. I think it was a little more optimistic than it would have been if I were writing it today.

Have things gotten worse in the past six months?

I think having the Republicans control the government is really not good, and people who say that it doesn't matter who the president is are just talking through their hats. [ L i P ]

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