Jane Flax has praised Dorothy "Dinnerstein's steely insistence on...women's collusion in sustaining oppressive gender arrangements." Flax further comments: "I think this insistence partially accounts for [Dinnerstein's] disappearance within feminist canons. The tug toward the pleasures of victimization and the political innocence and solidarity it offers (especially for white, heterosexual, Western, well-off feminists) remains hard to resist" (Jane Flax, "Reentering the Labyrinth: Revisiting Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 27, no. 4, p. 1038)).
I love this quotation and find it helpful, and not just because I love Dorothy Dinnerstein's book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual arrangements and human malaise. The rejection of personal responsibility and accountability by privileged grown-ups in favor of some false, childlike "innocence" and criticism-immune "victimhood" is something I've been hurt by when I've experienced it among people taking feminist and quasi-feminist perspectives (including some of my fellow gay men). It's hard to think of anything more likely to prevent honest, constructive, empathic communication than this kind of false self-infantilization.
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