ABSTRACT
Nothing in the above is intended to suggest a kind of criterion of immediacy. Women are not feminists by virtue of the fact alone of being women: feminism is a social-political reality, a struggle, a commitment, women become feminists. Simply, the negotiation between lived experience and feminism is for them direct, feminism includes that experience as its material and its energy, producing a knowledge of it for action, for change. The contradictions that may exist between, say, a woman’s experience in her family in the defined roles of wife and housewife and mother which may be felt by her as the
authentic terms of her being, where she is really “herself,” and the perspectives feminism will give on that experience, those defined roles, on her position as a woman, are what feminism is about, what it looks at, works from, involves, allowing the move and join from woman to feminist. For a man the negotiation is blocked, doubly contradictory: his experience is her oppression, and at the end of whatever negotiation he might make he can only always also confront the fact that feminism starts from there. To refuse the confrontation, to ignore, repress, forget, slide over, project onto “other men” that fact, is for a man to refuse feminism, not to listen to what it says to him as a man, imagining to his satisfaction a possible relation instead of the difficult, contradictory, self-critical, painful, impossible one that men must, for now, really live.
