The Widening Gyre

The title of this entry is an exercise in crude attention-grabbery, but it’s also essentially what I’m asking. Violet recently responded to a post by Lisa Kansas in which the latter got fed up with feminists excusing women, including sex workers, who have sex with married men. The discussion continued here, here, and here. Feel free to read it if you’ve got some time, but I’ll give you the quick and dirty and then veer somewhat off topic, so the details won’t be essential. Basically Lisa was pissed that the sister of the woman with whom John Edwards had an affair dared to try to defend her honor. The reason this was relevant was because Lisa believes that the sister’s response was typical of feminism:

Frankly, I’m completely sick of so-called feminists maintaining a tomblike silence on the females who engage in this behavior and the damage it does all those female spouses.

Unsurprisingly, the response was on the whole less than sympathetic (to Lisa). People accused her of slut shaming, and violet even said,

I don’t think in the context of feminist blogging and critique that shaming these individuals is either valuable or appropriate.

which is dangerously close to trying to revoke her feminist card, at least on this issue.

What’s most interesting to me about this hullabaloo is that it gets to the heart of a major difference between liberal and conservative rhetoric and analysis. (more…)