It’s like feminism never happened
Originally posted at The New Agenda.
There’s an essay by Judith Timson in today’s Globe and Mail that is so much in line with my own thinking, I could almost have written it myself. Timson is grieving over the lack of feminist consciousness in the young women who are busy blaming Rihanna for getting beaten to a pulp by Chris Brown:
Recent events have made me wonder despairingly whether decades of modern feminism have made any significant dent at all in the quality of relationships between young women and men.
The Web chatter by teenage girls who have been casually forgiving of rapper Chris Brown’s alleged battering of his girlfriend, singer Rihanna, has stymied me. If you judge by some of the posts, many girls seem to think she must have done something to provoke it, or that she is equally to blame. A New York Times story last week, headlined “Teenage girls stand by their man,” quoted one Grade 9er: “She probably made him mad for him to react like that. You know, like, bring it on?”
Timson sees more of the same — or worse, really — in the MT murder case in Toronto, in which a 17-year-old girl talked her boyfriend into murdering a 14-year-old girl, apparently in exchange for sexual favors:
These vile text messages, flatly discussing “bj’s” and “bang bangs” and fuelled by the obsessive irrational hatred of one girl toward another, depicted an emotional landscape devoid of respect, conscience or heart. They also revealed a very retro scenario – a monster girl who thinks her power lies in bitchily, and then murderously, vanquishing another girl.
In these cases, girls see other girls as the enemy in the endless hand-to-hand combat to capture guys. Chris Brown is better off outta there, say those girls. Don’t you know?
I bolded the part that is crucial, the part that I keep talking about incessantly to my friends/family/dog/wall, the part about how this behavior is profoundly pre-feminist. This is how women are trained to behave under patriarchy: all value and status flow from men, so women must compete with each other for access to men and the resources they control.
Results from the Boston Public Health Commission's survey of teens on the Rihanna/Chris Brown case
Eavesdropping on the thoughts of these hate-full (I use the term with precision) young women is, for me, like traveling in a time machine. This is how women ruthlessly cut each other down in the days before feminism. Read nineteenth century novels, check out the diatribes of anti-feminist women at the fin de siècle, watch an old B-movie from the 50s. It’s the patriarchal snakepit.
That’s why the first job of Second Wave feminism in the late 1960s was consciousness-raising: bringing women together to deconstruct these patterns and understand how we had not just been brainwashed into accepting our subordinate status, but also how we’d been pitted against each other from girlhood.
But today, after decades of backlash, it’s as if feminism never happened:
Many boy-girl relationships today have become a retro minefield because of the confluence of several things.
First, there has been the sexualization of young women very early in their teens, so that being “hot” and attracting boys becomes an early measurement of their worth, and remains that way well into adulthood.
Second, there’s been a devaluing of feminism and its true principles in the media and popular culture. Feminism has been both trivialized – softened into what I call “you go girl-ism” – and demonized by exaggerating scary things such as man hatred.
The frustrating thing, Timson says, is that “teenage girls today have been given every single tool they need to gain their own equality: the words, the books, the laws; the examples everywhere of women, sometimes their own mothers, achieving at work and living in respectful and equal domestic relationships.”
Yes — but. Here I part company with Timson. Girls have not been given every tool. The anti-feminist backlash has been too strong. The deeply-rooted social patterns that Second Wave feminism starting chipping away at are still largely intact, like icebergs under the surface. A girl today grows up with a working mom and laws guaranteeing equality, but almost everything she watches on TV, hears on the radio, sees in the movies, reads in magazines, and buys at the store reinforces the age-old message: men run the world, and women are the sex class.
Add to that the particularly toxic flavor of modern culture — brutal and degrading pornography, hip-hop that glorifies violence and abuse of women, “torture porn” movies, even magazine ads designed to look like rape scenes — and it’s no wonder girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny.
We need to re-start feminism. We need to re-start the consciousness-raising, the remedial lessons, the basic 101 stuff. We need to bring our message to every woman and girl — and every man and boy — in this country.
If I have one wish for The New Agenda, it’s that we can recapture the clarity and power of the Second Wave. Except this time, we won’t let ourselves get bogged down and fractured and backlashed into oblivion.
47 Responses to “It’s like feminism never happened”
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bluemorning says:
“Add to that the particularly toxic flavor of modern culture — brutal and degrading pornography, hip-hop that glorifies violence and abuse of women, “torture porn” movies, even magazine ads designed to look like rape scenes — and it’s no wonder girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny.
We need to re-start feminism. We need to re-start the consciousness-raising, the remedial lessons, the basic 101 stuff. We need to bring our message to every woman and girl — and every man and boy — in this country.”
YES-YES-YES!!!!! A brilliant post, Thank you.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:47 am EST -
deanbcurtis says:
“A girl today grows up with a working mom and laws guaranteeing equality, but almost everything she watches on TV, hears on the radio, sees in the movies, reads in magazines, and buys at the store reinforces the age-old message: men run the world, and women are the sex class.”
Indeed. That is one of the many reasons that I feel there needs to be a wider support of mainstream feminist art. It is disheartening, the bevy of films or books that are created by women, with the ideals of feminism, that go unremarked. Or worse, when the success of a specific property is only exalted by a press that will neither mention, nor see, it’s feminist underpinning.
Excellent post, as always.
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yttik says:
I don’t think feminism has ever been achieved. It’s like an ideal we have aimed for, for a couple of hundred years. Probably longer. Women got the right to vote, we got some domestic violence laws, we got some access to birth control, we got the right to work outside the home in addition to our unpaid labor within the home. Then the backlash hit and feminism has been under attack ever since. It’s like three steps forward and two back.
Remember those old cig ads, “you’ve come a long way baby?” We haven’t, we’ve only just begun with a couple of baby steps. And along the way we’ve seen feminism hijacked, packaged and marketed back at us. It’s a huge obstacle we’re going to have to over come.
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morninmist says:
whow, you so hit it on the mark Violet.
And this last campaign proves sexism exists and many just brush it off. -
Elise says:
Okay, but how do we do this? Do we need an organization like, I don’t know, the Girl Scouts but focused on giving girls better messages? (Although for all I know, Girl Scouts might be giving all the right messages. It’s been decades since I’ve been a Girl Scout.) After school programs? Ms. magazine but without the “we support third world cultures even though they’re misogynist” stuff and aimed at younger girls? How?
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Sweet Sue says:
Let’s start by doing away with a Ms. Magazine that refused to support the only American woman who ever had a good chance to win the Presidency and, instead, jumped on the hope/change circus wagon.
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julia says:
There may be laws guaranteeing equality, but in practice they don’t work – we are still the poorest class. We still live in a country that refuses to pay for childcare and healthcare, which hurts all women.
I’m glad there are girls playing soccer, successful women doctors and writers, a woman Secretary of State. But I’m thinking about most women, who do the un-paid labor of caring for children, husbands, households; women who are stuck in ‘pink collar’ jobs, the mulititude of women who clean, serve, answer telephones, type, cashier. Most women are in low paying, tiring jobs that will forever keep them invisible and second class.
And that is exactly how patriarchy wants it.
Some feminists say that there is no such thing as second class: either you have full citizenship or you are a slave.
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anna says:
Any suggestions for feminist books, movies, radio stations, magazines etc? The Amelia Bloomer Project (http://libr.org/ftf/bloomer.html) has recommendations of feminist books for younger readers.
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sister of ye says:
we got the right to work outside the home in addition to our unpaid labor within the home
Just a small addition to your point. Women have always worked outside the home. Only women in privileged classes had the leisure to do only their own domestic work (or better, get others to do it). Women have been nannies, nurses, seamstresses, merchants, craftspeople and, yes, wh*res. They’ve pulled barges and slogged water. They’ve picked crops, tended chickens, and churned butter. When industrialization started, they worked in unsafe factories for abysmal pay.
What we fought for was to get control over our labor, to get the prestige jobs and the pay we deserve, to have the right to keep our own money and use it as we please. We fought to support ourselves decently now and in old age, not live off some reluctant relative. We fought for recognition, damn it, not to pen novels in a garret under pseudonyms. It’s mine, I built it/designed it/created it/labored at it, it’s worth something – now pay me for it.
Sorry if that strayed a bit off the main topic. I just find these teens’ attitude hard to grasp. Maybe it was growing up with six brothers, but whatever worth men have, I could never see them as a prize to beat each other over. But I concede I was never properly socialized.
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AM says:
“If I have one wish for The New Agenda, it’s that we can recapture the clarity and power of the Second Wave. Except this time, we won’t let ourselves get bogged down and fractured and backlashed into oblivion.”
Those embodying the “clarity and power of the Second Wave” have been recast now as old, bitter sino-Peruvian lesbians.(As if those were bad things. Hum along: what the world needs now… .) We were too fragile to handle disagreements with each other.
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song says:
Dear Dr.Socks,
I wrote a 3 part article? on my new blog. Please take a moment and visit….before you post this. I had thought of submitting it to the New Agenda…but it isn’t exactly right for that…
dunno
It’s about last century’s feminism and pink.http://flyingthinker.wordpress.....gue-verte/
love,
song
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Sis says:
(…) sino-Peruvian? Please. Do continue.
Ahh sister of ye–what you’ve outlined, that *is* the point.
I have been in the midst of many woman battering situations, some featuring me, but none so puzzling as one here last month, with the sounds of someone being thumped and bashed around. When I investigated (as I always do) it turned out to be a young man thumping his girlfriend. I don’t think they were a day over 25. Not married, no children, but she was putting up with it, why? We fought so hard for battered women’s shelters, so married women had a place to go, with their children; never thinking those few places of respite would be filled with young unencumbered women with two graduate degrees.
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Kiuku says:
I really like Sister of Ye’s comment.
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madamab says:
I’m too young to have participated in the Second Wave. All I got was the bogus Third Wave that tried to tell me that strutting around showing my body off for men was the height of feminine empowerment. Needless to say, I never bought into it. Men want to have sex with us no matter what we’re wearing. No need to tart ourselves up like a bunch of fools.
Violence against women continues to be underreported and underemphasized by the patriarchy. I read recently that 130 MILLION LIVING WOMEN have been victims of Female Genital Mutilation. 130 MILLION! And that’s just the ones who survived the process, which is often done with broken glass.
I continue to believe that concrete goals are the way to achieve feminist clarity. The patriarchy is very skilled at blaming the victims. Let’s set some legislative goals for ourselves and work towards achieving them. The ERA, the Paycheck Fairness Act, tougher penalties for violence against women; these are things we can agree on.
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Alwaysthinking says:
I don’t wonder that young girls are confused today about feminism. They get so many mixed messages –from the fundamentalists telling them to be submissive wives to the vast array of female stars and media personalities who daily demonstrate how to be sexy while some man also cutely ridicules them. Meanwhile, they see competent women political candidates being verbally trashed. Some younger women also have become so inured to being called the worst of names themselves that they don’t even see what is wrong with it. To them, it is just joshing or kidding. Very sad.
Maybe there is hope, though. My young neighbor is a pre-teen Girl Scout and she seems to be on a high learning curve with high-minded visions for herself. I do hope it lasts. However, I don’t think the young women want to fight for their rights like their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers had to fight. They want to be different, not really understanding that history teaches us we have to be ever-vigilant.
There are so many forces worldwide against women right now. On PBS last night I heard an African man say that even if he had AIDS, he would have sex and not wear a condom. Asked whether the woman could say “no,” he said she could not. Meanwhile, our leaders in this country continue to enable the belittling of women. How can we lead the world in a new direction? Are we any better than the African man, who didn’t even seem to realize that he might be destroying his own future children and society (all in the name of male dominance)?
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Cyn says:
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Marketing and advertising and corporate profits are the ruination of the world. The word “tween” makes me sick.
I truly think we can only make strides by one on one action. If we can take each woman, child and man in our lives and talk to them and make them understand that equality empowers all of us, maybe we can accomplish something.
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Lynnerkat says:
My 16 yr old niece is clueless.Her mother busts her ass and is in a pretty powerful position, but she does all the house stuff since hubby is always working. Not much of a switch from decades before. I wanted her to watch Hillary’s speech at the convention, but she didn’t see it as important as FanFic. Where to go from there?? I read the Feminist Mystique at 16 and voted for abortion at 18 in NY. I am so depressed.
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Sis says:
If you think you can bear it, this columnist covered the trial and copies from court documents some of the texting dialogue between the girl accused of getting her boyfriend to murder the girl she was jealous of. I think it’s instructive, or I wouldn’t post it. It’s not just horrible, it’s telling us something about the internet. And I think we’ve seen some of it, particularly with a couple of feminist bloggers who were run off the web by young men and their girlfriends who think this is good fun.
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deanbcurtis says:
Lynnerkat,
I agree with your sentiments, and do understand the general point your getting across with the Hillary/FanFic comparison. But, to nerd things up a bit, there is actually a great amount of Women’s Invisible History in fanfic.
For instance, Comiket, the largest convention in the world, was started in the 70′s by an all women doujin circle (fanfic group). On top of that, it was created with the intention of studying Year 24 Group (an all women mangaka team), and more specifically, the works of Hagio Moto (a legendary member of Year 24 Group). Now, in the West, fanfic had practically the same start. Again, going back to the 70′s, and again, going back to a field heavily skewed toward women. With this case though, the inspiration stemmed from Star Trek, and became what is known as Slash.
So, as is a recurring theme throughout time, women seem to be around some pretty important events. Maybe Ms. Magazine will write about them someday… in 2068.
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polly styrene says:
The problem is twofold. Young women’s oppression no longer stares them in the face so obviously, so it’s easy to convince them that liberation has happened. Women have jobs and can vote, what’s the problem? Secondly the reason why their oppression no longer stares them in the face – it is dressed up and sold back to them as a a means of getting the all important male approval.
Some women see attacking other women (literally in this case) as a way of gaining kudos with males. It’s the need/want/desire for male approval that needs to be tackled. Not easy when males still hold the key to all the resources.
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Sis says:
And also, don’t forget we’re talking about CHILDREN. Fourteen-year-olds are not women. Seventeen-year-olds, the majority, are not women. And then where do they get their idea of womanhood from? The media, social media, in all it women-hating glory.
Time-Warner owns most of the porn production companies. It’s not some separate entity. http://abcnewsstore.go.com/web.....1&
categoryId=100021 -
RKMK says:
I am torn between thrall of the awesomeness of this post, and despair at the state of things. I’m of the “third wave” generation, but (like madamab) always was skeptical of feminism that looked suspiciously like patriarchy.
The thing is, I do what I can to talk to others, but I often find myself at a loss for words, mostly because feminism came so naturally to me. I identified as a feminist from the age of 5 (thanks, She-Ra!); it was common sense, it was like breathing. Sometimes I don’t know how to change people’s thinking, because I never needed an argument myself; feminism is, to me, common sense. Sky is blue. Grass is green. Women are people. I feel at a loss how other people don’t understand that.
I do think the key lies in media, though. I watched TV produced by the second wave in my formative years. I read “The Paper-Bag Princess.” I watched She-Ra. I read book series (Sweet Valley Twins/High, The Saddle Club, The BabySitters Club, Nancy Drew Files) that had girls front-and-center. The messages (especially with SVT/SVH, I go back and read them now and cringe) weren’t always perfectly feminist, but the idea that girls/women were people (that they were individuals, that they were equal and active participants in the world) was central to them. I don’t have children, and I’m not sure what girls have available to them right now, but we need more of that stuff – it can sink into the consciousness more than any classroom lecture.
(And little boys need to read/watch them, too.)
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Ana says:
Reminds me of what my mom once told me when, as a teenage girl, I said it was unfair that I was expected to wax my arms and legs twice a month but boys with the same amount of body hair weren’t. She said, “But 90% of women do it”.
And that’s just it. Women are taught to only compare themselves to other women and dismiss every instance of sexism as “natural” gender differences. To compare ourselves with people from that other half of the population is just as ridiculous and disgusting as a woman with body hair.
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gxm17 says:
High school girls were mean back in the 70s too. At least that was my experience. One of the best aspects about growing older is that women are nicer to me now.
It’s a sad fact of our society that many women and girls base their self worth on male attention. How many women have I known who were not self-actualized until they married? Too many to count!
And here is a place where men can really step up to the plate. I have never felt an overwhelming need for male approval and I think that’s because I was a daddy’s girl. I was raised in consistent, kind and loving male approval. That’s a wonderful gift men can give to their daughters.
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Elise says:
madamab says: The ERA, the Paycheck Fairness Act, tougher penalties for violence against women; these are things we can agree on.
All this kind of stuff – all demands for legislation – strike me as us acting like we can’t get ahead, we can’t figure out a better way for ourselves unless we can convince “them” to give us this stuff. If we think we need the ERA, the Paycheck Fairness Act, tougher penalties for violence against women to make progress, then we’re in big trouble. Think about it. What better way is there to keep women from seizing control of their own lives than by always dangling in front of them the promise that someday some (male-controlled) legislature will pass some law that will fix everything? They won’t pass it and even if they do, it won’t fix everything. So then they’ll promise some other piece of legislation that will fix things and we’ll all be counting on that.
Yes, there’s room to do more legistlatively. But take the idea of tougher penalties for violence against women. The laws against spousal abuse – however imperfect – are much better now than they were 35 years ago. And yet you have Sis’ example of a young, well-educated woman who was being abused by her spouse: Not married, no children, but she was putting up with it, why? Until we can figure out a way to teach women they shouldn’t put up with it, all the penalties in the world aren’t going to do us any good.
I am not blaming the victim. But nobody else is going to fix things for us. We need to teach younger women to value themselves, to make smart decisions that have nothing to do with male approval, to stick up for themselves.
Cyn says: Marketing and advertising and corporate profits are the ruination of the world.
I think corporate profits are the engine that drives prosperity and what I’d like is to figure out ways to make sure women get more of them. And if you don’t think getting a bigger share of the profits means more power – whatever political system you live in – then you haven’t been paying attention.
As for advertising, why not use it to our advantage? Pick out one of those “tween” magazines that say the main focus of a girl’s life is pleasing boys through clothes and make-up. Then run a counter-ad in it, something that says:
You’ll see a lot of ads in this magazine that tell you to worry about how you look and what you wear and whether boys like you. We think there are more important things for girls to worry about. Like running your own life and getting a good job and not having children – or sex – until you want to. And we think anyone who tells you that all you should worry about is what some boy thinks of you is trying to make a fool of you.
polly styrene says: It’s the need/want/desire for male approval that needs to be tackled. Not easy when males still hold the key to all the resources.
I agree women – especially young women – need to taught not to compromise themselves for male approval. But males don’t hold the key to all the resources. We have made gains over the last 35 years. The trick is to grab everything we can get from those gains and help younger women leverage what we grabbed to grab even more. If Congress throws us a bone every so often, great. But we’d have to be crazy to pin all our hopes on persuading a political system to part with one iota of its power.
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julia says:
I am so tired of having to defend us – women, feminism, that sexism is real and prevelant.
I have been spending time with a seasoned peace activist, whose life is about living simply and not paying taxes for war. He is a very unusual American man except for one thing: he will not talk about sexism. And he’s big on Gay Liberation – go figure. I gave him a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s
‘I Want a 24 Hour Truce’ thinking we’d conspire over it. He was obviously offended.I’m not lesbian, but I may become a seperatist.
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Lynnerkat says:
deanbcurtis-
Thank you for that- I haven’t spent much time there and will check it out. It still breaks my heart that so many young women take so much for granted. They have little outrage at what is now going on. I fear that they will not look up until it’s too late.L.
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Kiuku says:
I disagree that teenage girls have been given every tool they need. In fact, it’s obvious from media and anti feminist backlash brainwashing why these results are not surprising. This kind of thinking is rewarded.
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soopermouse says:
They haven’t. Feminis strove to give them all the tool, then Patriarchy fought back by tellign them the tools were irrelevant
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madamab says:
Elise – I guess black people didn’t need the Civil Rights Amendment either.
All due respect, you could not be more wrong.
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gxm17 says:
I agree with madamab. The civil rights movement required people of all races, not just African Americans. We need to have men on board, as well as those women who have been brainwashed into thinking feminism is a dirty word. How do we change those minds that are already made up? How do we gain back the ground we’ve lost and make sure it isn’t lost again? Personally I think the ERA is a great place to start.
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gxm17 says:
And just what’s so scary about the ERA anyway?
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Kiuku says:
“The problem is twofold. Young women’s oppression no longer stares them in the face so obviously, so it’s easy to convince them that liberation has happened. Women have jobs and can vote, what’s the problem? Secondly the reason why their oppression no longer stares them in the face – it is dressed up and sold back to them as a a means of getting the all important male approval.
Some women see attacking other women (literally in this case) as a way of gaining kudos with males. It’s the need/want/desire for male approval that needs to be tackled. Not easy when males still hold the key to all the resources.”
Exactly. Further young women see women on TV with jobs but they do not yet actually have to get a job or work in a job that treats them in a sexist way. Even in college things are still fairly liberal and have yet to feel the resource brunt of sexism, when they will either not get a job, get a typical-female-job (low paying), expect that they can just “get married”, and get paid less than the men, even though they have more qualifications.
At this point it is hard for young women even to find other Feminists as we have a lot of men and anti feminists masquerading as feminists.
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Kiuku says:
btw I mean the expectations that others have, men in particular, that women can just get married, and that men need to support families. Young women haven’t been hit yet in the pocket to realize that sexism exists in ways that are neither cute or funny. They experience sexism but they are told everywhere that this is “natural” and that in order to stop men’s violence women have to accept their roles and understand men. Young women blame themselves. I think they are very aware of sexism but are not given the tools to fight it; the opposite.
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samanthasmom says:
According to my dearly departed Mom, if the ERA passed we would have had to share public bathrooms with men, and we would have lost our right to be “special”. And when I get older, I’ll be glad it failed. I guess this grandmother is still very young.
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anna says:
Unisex bathrooms already exist anyway.
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lexia says:
gxm17,
One glaring difference between the movement that brought the civil rights of black citizens in line with those of whites (men as full, women as second class citizens) with the movement to bring full rights to all women, is that the first was perceived as only affecting a relatively powerless one-quarter of the U.S.
It appeared to cost the majority of those who advocated for it nothing, a mistake the rest of the country learned when they had to confront their own embedded racism under the new laws.
I lived in the southern U.S. for several years when segregation was still in force and believe that it would have been dismantled as slowly as the current caste system for women, had it been up to those for whom it was the only culture they’d ever known.
That difference in cultural acceptance was the idea behind including women in the 1964 civil rights act, a move by southern senators to forces the other 3/4 of the country to either drop the bill (the desired outcome) or to face their own hypocrisy. In the end, the non-southerners tried to have it both ways – force morality on one part of the country and simply ignore those pesky parts about women. NOW was created to make the U.S. government obey its own laws and include women, after years of the EEOC simply ignoring that part of the act and the cases women brought under it.
Women fought very hard to make Title VII of the 1964 act reality for women’s lives for at least two decades, resisted all the way by the very same men who preached, cajoled and fought for implementation of the racial equality laws. It took those men and the courts 30 years to re-segregate women’s rights from minority men’s rights and undo all that women had achieved, but they have succeeded. Job segregation is as legal now as it was in 1964; pay differences require only the thinnest veneer of excuses (try applying for a construction job, or talk to an honest woman in IT or engineering, or look at the number of women paid well enough to be power brokers). Women are officially excluded from the most effective laws protecting minority men.
I was very glad to see segregation begin to be dismantled in the southern U.S. but appalled when it became apparent that the brothers, friends, classmates and coworkers who opposed race discrimination did not include women in their idea of equality. I know morality can be legislated, I’ve seen its partial success in the southern U.S. and its stunning success in the military. But women do not have three quarters of this country where men believe themselves unaffected by women’s full equality and thus are willing to force that view on a small defeated quarter in the name of abstract justice. I don’t think the evil of race discrimination would have begun to be eradicated without this necessary hypocrisy. Given men’s unclouded view of the benefits of sexism, and the evidence of the past thirty years of their determination to keep those benefits, I don’t know how women are to achieve the same results.
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Elise says:
Elise – I guess black people didn’t need the Civil Rights Amendment either.
There are 3 amendments that could be considered “Civil Rights” amendments: the 13th, banning slavery; the 14th, guaranteeing citizenship to former slaves and guaranteeing due process; and the 15th, prohibiting race-based and previous servitude-based voting restrictions. The last of these was passed in 1870. And blacks did need all of these since they were slaves and previous Supreme Court decisions had specifically restricted their rights based on their servitude.
You will note, however, that except for making them no longer slaves (and share-croppers might even argue with that), these amendments did relatively little to give African-Americans full citizenship until the country developed the conscience and the will to enforce to live up to them. That took just about 100 years if you figure the 24th amendment was the milestone for that event.
I trust that answers your implied question. However, my point was I’d rather see women expend their energies on helping themselves and each other and on educating the public about why feminism matters than on trying to pass legislation. I don’t think that makes me any less a feminist or a bad feminist or an incorrect feminist anymore than I think someone whose primary goal is passing the ERA is a less/bad/incorrect feminist.
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Elise says:
It would be interesting to see what would happen to a drive to push the ERA right now. After all, the Presidency is in the hands of a very liberal Democrat; the House and Senate are each about 60% Democrat; and about 55% of the states went for Obama in the Presidential election.
My guess is that if a group of feminists did raise the issue of the ERA in an organized manner, they would be told to wait, that now is not the time, that other issues are more pressing. I just wonder if they’d be told that only by the Administration or if other voices would join in? The women in the House? Institutional feminists like NOW? And I wonder what Republicans would do?
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sister of ye says:
the Presidency is in the hands of a very liberal Democrat
Assumes facts not in evidence. Ask not only women, but gay people (men and women) and working class people (especially the oft-trashed auto workers). Those clere of hope-hype would disagree with that assertion.
Easy to predict what would happen if the ERA were pushed again – a mobilization of conservative “we have to oppress you for your own good” forces joined by the “wait your turn” liberals. The “feminist establishment” would probably join the with latter.
It’s true the ERA or legislation isn’t a magic fix-it. I haven’t seen anyone here suggest that is.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t right and necessary. I don’t see enacting laws in our own country to give us standing and access to remedies thru our own government that we pay our own taxes for as “waiting for someone to grant us something.”
For the attitude-changing work, if you have strategies to do that, go for it. Share your ideas, work with others to implement them. It’s not an either/or.
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Elise says:
I don’t see enacting laws in our own country to give us standing and access to remedies thru our own government that we pay our own taxes for as “waiting for someone to grant us something.”
I don’t either as long as: it’s realistic to expect them to be enacted; putting time, money, and energy into enacting them doesn’t mean other more doable goals are set aside; and once the laws are enacted they actually help.
I don’t think the ERA meets any of those criteria; others do. That’s fine with me. Or perhaps for others fighting the fight is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself. That’s fine, too.
This may be an age thing. I started college about 2 months before Representative Griffiths made her resolution. I wore an ERA bracelet for years. I harassed my poor state legislator’s office, eventually forcing someone on his staff to swear to me that if God himself told the legislator not to vote for the ERA it still wouldn’t shake his support. It became the Holy Grail, the one thing women needed to be truly equal.
I don’t think going down that road again is a profitable use of time, energy, money, or political capital.
As for Obama, I take your point and would amend my description to, “the Presidency is in the hands of a Democrat who claimed to support socially liberal causes when he was running for office.” I also think you’re right about how the various factions would line up behind the ERA (or rather, not behind the ERA) but the Republicans are still a little question mark in my mind. This would be a wonderful opportunity for them to make some political hay but I’m not sure they could bring themselves to do it.
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Msakel says:
It’s cruely true that “girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny”. The girl in Toronto who exchanged sexual favours with a boy so that he would kill her “competition” horrified me. But I feel that, as stated here, it’s our culture’s backlash that dictates the rules for girls. I see a constant Cultural War going on around us. Male cultural values are lording it over female cultural values. Pedophiles are predominantly male. Domestic violence (irony!) is really wife-abuse! And more women have died in the “friendly fire” of “domestic” abuse in the hands of their intimate others than soldiers in Vietnam and Iraq combined. I just reread the Canadian book “The War against Women” and it does make a lot of sense.
Reclusive Leftist is right and this statement will haunt me…”Girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny”! How could this be. It’s only yesterday that we struggled to make this a better world for girls and women. Hillary’s run showed us just how naive we are in our assumptions…. -
T.I. says:
Msakel mentioned,
“I just reread the Canadian book “The War against Women” and it does make a lot of sense.”Near my desk I have a softcover copy of Marilyn French’s The War Against Women (1992 Ballantine edition; ISBN 0-345-38248-X). Is that the book you mean, Msakel?
Though her many books have been sold in Canada and elsewhere, Marilyn French was born in the great city & state of New York, NY. Afaik, she is alive and well as she approaches the age of 80. Three cheers for her, for NY, for both of my grandmothers, and above all, for feminists who tell us what we *need* to hear.
The War Against Women isn’t huge and comprehensive; it’s an essay (some would call it a polemic) in book form with the added convenience of chapters and subheaders. She tries to cover a lot of ground, so she selects certain examples from around the world, with varying degrees of detail.
She provides the most interesting details on the very subjects where people tend to make the most assumptions yet have the least information. How many Americans think Poland’s Solidarity movement for workers’ rights was started by Wech Walesa? French tells us it was organized by two women. Try looking up the names of Anna Walentynowicz (welder & crane op.) and Alina Pienkowska (nurse) to see how much info is on the web re. Walentynowicz’s Independent Trade Union (after the males forced her out of “their” union), and her galling subjection to a men’s prison, with charges of insanity against her.
French also cites examples from the Middle East– including Israel, a country with high rates of violence against women despite assumptions (and bloggers’ statements) to the contrary. (Credit due as well to Andrea Dworkin for her works re Israel, and to Nikki Craft et al for maintaining access to them, via “http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/books.html” and related webpages.) French rightly points out parallels between Muslim and Jewish oppression of women, e.g. men hurling objects and epithets at Jewish women merely trying to pray at the Wailing Wall, much like Iranian and Iraqi men have hurled at women who try to assert their rights in those countries.
Do I have to add, I recommend it?
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anne says:
The Toronto story sounds a lot more like a psychopathic scumbag murdered a young girl then claimed “my girlfriend made me do it”. Everybody is so keen to believe in the evil female manipulator.
Apparently he’d known the girl he murdered for a long time and had asked her for a blowjob when she was twelve.
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donna darko says:
Msakel
It’s cruely true that girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny.
It’s going backwards with Obama.
And his disastrous economic policies will take away any apparatus to fight racism or sexism. It will all be moot.
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Sis says:
They have the chat room documents with many hours of conversations. The girl charged with the crime was very actively pushing him to kill the girl who is now dead. However I think it’s absolutely reasonable to say the girl who has been charged was motivated by knowing she could lose whatever edge the patriarchy gave her.
You can read some of it, in the second link I provided, under Christie Blatchford’s byline.
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k.a.m. says:
This comment is a little off the subject of getting beat to a domestic violence pulp fiction,but it is right on the topic of “It’s As Though Feminism Never Happened” in regard to women banksters and Harvard graduates lining up to be pole dancers and strippers since the economy has tanked.
Talk about shakin’ your money maker.
The old adage “You’re sitting on a gold mine” baby seems to have hit home for hundreds of very intelligent and bright women….Seeing the “money makers” and movers and shakers of the former banking industry, talking about their undignified jobs now, on national mainstream tee vee, was both enlightening and sad. They never set out to be strippers, they said. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotto do.
Some things never change.
You’ve come a long way baby. But not that far.
There’s always the pole.
And even that is a phyllic symbol.
It is still a man’s world in relation to money.
