Your pearls are showing

In recent days, weeks, I'd noticed references to "pearl-clutching," and hadn't thought much of it. Slate's Torie Bosch, however, is on the case - turns out these references are very much a thing in the feminist blogosphere. Bosch's reference to how "Feministe used the phrase in a blog post about privilege and oppression" got me thinking. What is "pearl-clutching" if not a gender-specific variant of "your privilege is showing"? The clutcher-of-pearls is white, WASPy, conservatively-inclined, stuffy of morals, of-another-time, and, of course, female. It harkens back to notions of women as protectors of home and hearth, pious in eras when the men have grown cynical, fearful of taverns and fermented beverages and the fun the menfolk might have when out on their own. To hurl a "pearl-clutching" accusation is thus both feminist (the pearl-clutcher is fainting at the thought of women having filthy encounters with men or, horrors, other women) and anti-feminist (what if not the sexist norms in whichever part of society has led our pearl-clutcher to be so repressed?)

As with YPIS accusations, the person doing the hurling is not typically lacking the form of privilege in question. To stay with the metaphor, if the (female) hurler doesn't wear pearls, it's not because she didn't inherit a string or two from Gran. It's that she also benefitted from the privilege of attending a liberal-arts college, where she learned that "ladylike" dress is for strivers (i.e. those who enter the professions to escape a lower-middle-class future) and Republicans.

The symbolically-clutched theoretical pearls bring to mind another, more literal jewelry-based topic that came up here a while back: the workplace stigmatization of the woman with the (large, presumed-real-diamond) engagement ring. See also the tsk-tsking of women who alter their appearances (through surgery, makeup, hair extensions and implements) to look more conventionally attractive. These are all essentially, in many respects, the same idea.

There are many layers to dig through here. On the one hand, do we really want to claim that any choice a woman (who may well identify as anti-feminist) makes is by definition feminist, and by definition to be supported by feminists? Is a woman who chooses to insist that women submit to men acting in a way that feminists should support, insofar as she's female and expressing an opinion? It's better, from a feminist perspective, than a situation in which all women submit to men and don't even get to express opinions. Meanwhile, is the pearl-clutcher (or the carat-sporter, or fake-tan-and-weave-preferrer) really the epitome of unchecked privilege? Or is even thinking in these terms the more relevant sign of privilege - that is, is the person who knows to "check" her privilege the person who's so chock-full of every kind of capital, who has the down-time necessary to participate for hours in these truly epic-length threads, actually in a position of greater power?

Unfortunately - or, more accurately, fortunately - dissertation lunch-break is over, and it's time to make more coffee and get back to it. If, by the end of this comment, you don't find that you've swung several notches to the right, or begun favoring some kind of mandatory, Internet-free national service for all young people aged 15-45, I'm impressed.