"Come on, Foucault, just get in the car. We're going on a road trip!"

Noah points out that while it's "fun to play with that theorist you were just reading, and can't you just take him for a spin," politics is serious business:

Feminism is deadly serious. When women were trying to integrate the New York City Fire Department, male firefighters literally left the two dozen or so women stranded in burning buildings. Read these statistics about rape. Read these statistics about domestic violence. This is what feminism is about. And you know what? It works. Feminists, not anti-feminists, solve these problems.

The cheap answer here would be to say that everyone is against violent crime and dehumanizing sexual objectification, and, insofar as feminism is about making these things go away, my prayers are with 'em.

However, calling yourself a feminist doesn't just mean that you're against things like rape and sexual bribery; it means "I'm against rape and sexual bribery and I think that there are certain misogynistic structures at work in our society that allow these things to happen and make people more tolerant of these kinds of outrages." They don't just want to prosecute incidents of sexual bribery; they want to make big structural changes to our culture so that sexual bribery doesn't happen so often.

I'm basically on board with all of this so far—the "big structural change" that got rid of the assumption that women in certain professions were sexually available (secretary, flight attendant, barmaid, etc.), for instance, was a huge step forward. (I'll also concede to Noah that we have the feminists to thank for it.)

Which brings us to where I take issue with his post: changes of that scope are squarely in the realm of theory, otherwise known as "dithering about performativity and gender roles." Noah's right that feminism is important because it affects the real pain of real people, but this doesn't mean that the solution is on such a small scale. When male firefighters leave female colleagues in a burning building, it's murder; that doesn't mean we should prosecute them as ordinary criminals and leave it at that. We need to go after the prejudices that motivated them, and that means making our case in the arena of culture. It might mean using words like "performativity"; sorry.

Once we move the fight to theoretical turf, the question becomes whether the traditionalists or the feminists have a better picture of how these cultural structures should look. If Noah wants to say that the most important criterion should be which one results in the fewest incidences of degradation, rape, abuse, injustice, and death, that sounds like the decent thing to say. We probably disagree about what constitutes "degradation" and "injustice" (theory strikes again!), but, more importantly, assuming some compromise definitions of these words, it's clear to me that the conservative model comes out on top.

The case for conservatism as the ideology that's best for women (rather than "best for cultural stability" or "most in line with philosophical abstracts") is one that still needs to be made (I'm here all week...), but I'm alarmed that Noah might think that retro-feminists like myself aren't interested in making it.