From ‘Being Curious about Our Lack of Feminist Curiosity’ by Cynthia Enloe.
Being curious takes energy. It may thus be a distorted form of “energy conservation” that makes certain ideas so alluring.
Take, for instance, the loaded adjective “natural.” If one takes for granted that something is “natural”—generals being male, garment workers being female—it saves mental energy. After all, what has been deemed natural wasn’t self-consciously created. No decisions have to be made. The result: we can just imagine that there is nothing we need to investigate. We can just feel sympathy with women working in sweatshops, for instance, without bothering to figure out how they got there or what they think about being women sewing there.
Warning lights now start to flash in my head whenever I hear someone wielding “always.” Too often it has been used to cut short an awkward discussion. “Americans have always loved guns.” “Women have always seen one another as rivals.” A variant on “always” is “oldest”—as in the glib declaration “Prostitution is the oldest profession.” As if prostitution were timeless, without a history. As if the organizing of certain women’s sexuality so that it can serve simultaneously commercial and masculinized functions had “always” existed everywhere. Thank goodness, the fans of “always” imply, now we don’t have to invest our scarce energy in exploring that topic.
“Natural” and “always”: each has served as a cultural pillar to prop up familial, community, national, and international power structures, imbuing them with legitimacy, with timelessness, with inevitability. Thus we need to stop and scrutinize our lack of curiosity. We also need to be genuinely curious about others’ lack of curiosity—not for the sake of feeling self-satisfied, but for the sake of meaningfully engaging with those who take any power structure as unproblematic.
