[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
who were the perps? Tyson and Clinton were heroes to many. Was Monica
a victim or a tramp? Lorena became an emblem of female aggression gone
wrong a kind of latter-day Solanas. Many thought she was insane. Or
was she simply a desperate victim of domestic violence?
In a nation abuzz with talk of Anita, Lorena, Monica, and Antioch,
feminism became an easy movement to hate. The feminist rebellion against
sexism had somehow been rerouted, perceived by many as a war against
sex. If you were for Lorena, you must therefore be a victim-mongerer and
a man-hater. If you sympathized with Anita, you couldn t take a joke. If
you were expansive in your views against rape, you must be against sex and,
therefore, a prude. On many campuses, feminist became a label most
younger women no longer wanted to wear. Instead of the avant-garde
movement that once promised less restriction and more fun, feminism had
become conflated with victimology, sexual protectionism, humorlessness,
and rules.
There was another reason for the so-called rejection of feminism among
the younger generation. If you grew up believing you were equal, then wasn t
the term feminist with its implication of battles yet unwon itself a
threat to your sense of social standing? It was all this and more against
02 siegel text 4/20/07 9:35 AM Page 115
POSTFEMINIST PANACHE 115
which women like Roiphe women just coming into their own nascent
power rebelled.
REVAMPING THE F WORD
In the early 1990s, popular culture stoked our imaginations with images of
unconventional, empowered heroines women who ran with wolves, as
the 1993 bestseller by Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes called the
woman who followed her gut instincts. Saucy working-class television
mom Roseanne and single-mom career woman Murphy Brown blurred the
line between off-screen and on-screen confidence and power particularly
when single-mom Murphy mocked Vice President Dan Quayle s old-
fashioned disapproval of her unmarried status in an episode titled You Say
Potatoe, I Say Potato. Hollywood stories like Fried Green Tomatoes and
Thelma and Louise projected worlds in which sisterhood trumped mar-
riage. In the 1980s, in box office hits 9 to 5 and Working Girl, brainy ca-
reer women had bested their bosses, but in the early 1990s, Silence of the
Lambs showed us Jodie Foster as a tough, smart FBI agent, flipping the tra-
ditional horror movie model and giving rise to a whole generation of droll,
unflinching female investigators and forensic experts on American prime
time. The same year that Jodie went head-to-head with Hannibal Lecter,
Linda Hamilton, playing a buff, combat-ready female action heroine, vied
for the spotlight with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.
Images of powerful women were rampant. But young and femi-
nist were two words one rarely saw together in a sentence. By 1992, a
study of the most empowered female generation to date women on col-
lege campuses showed that most young women no longer wanted to be
associated with feminism. According to a Time/CNN poll, while 77 per-
cent of women thought the women s movement made life better, and 94
percent said it had helped women become more independent, and 82
percent said it was still improving the lives of women, only 33 percent of
women identified themselves as feminists. Although over half (57 per-
cent) of the women interviewed said they believed there was a need for a
strong women s movement, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) said they did
02 siegel text 4/20/07 9:35 AM Page 116
116 SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED
not consider themselves feminists.19 I m not a feminist, but . . . be-
came the mantra of the day.
When young women said I m not a feminist, but . . . , they often
went on to add something suspiciously feminist sounding in the rest of
their sentence. What many of them meant by the hallmark disclaimer was,
I may believe in women s equality, but I m not uptight. Feminism s new,
end-of-the-millennium reframers gave this so-called uptight feminism
many names establishment feminism, orthodox feminism, ideological
feminism, gender feminism, resenter feminism, victim feminism, The New
Victorianism, official feminism, upscale feminism, elite feminism and
wanted to reanimate it with relevance, meaning, family-friendliness, and,
above all, sex appeal.
New feminists came up with new names for everything. They wanted to
refurbish the language, the ideas, and the face. New names were necessary
strong and edgy names. Most famously, perhaps, was power feminism
the alluring name for a feminism where women were in control. Power
feminism, explained Naomi Wolf, who coined the term, meant identifying
with other women through shared pleasures and strengths rather than
through shared vulnerability. In place of a sentimental fantasy of cosmic sis-
terhood, power feminists imagined a network of alliances based on eco-
nomic self-interest and economic giving back. It was not about being weak
but being strong. It was not about hating men but hating sexism.20
Although power feminism also had to do with harnessing the resources
of the wealthy and mobilizing the mass power of the poor, what the media
most picked up on was its implication of power through sex. Power femi-
nism the sexed-up kind made its way into the popular men s magazines
Esquire, where writer Tad Friend coined what may be the oxymoron of the
movement or not? do-me feminism in 1994. In the wake of the rape
debates, that term said it all. (Friend wholeheartedly supported the do-mes
fight for a woman s right to get laid and a man s right to lay her, taking
the phrase asking for it to a new level.)
But the new feminist had other, more buttoned-up names too. An
equity feminist, according to Christina Hoff Sommers, was one who
fought for full civil and legal equality rather than the total abolition of gen-
02 siegel text 4/20/07 9:35 AM Page 117
POSTFEMINIST PANACHE 117
der roles. A family feminist, according to Elizabeth Fox Genovese, was
one who trusted women to set their own priorities, based on the facts of
their lives, rather than try to live up to an unattainable ideal.
In addition to the offputting rhetoric and unattainable ideals, many re-
claimers felt that old feminism did women a disservice because at the end
of the millennium, American women were no longer very oppressed. Wolf
and Daphne Patai, among others, faulted the old guard for going against
progress. Men are seeing their empire begin to crumble; their world is in-
deed dying, observed Wolf in Fire with Fire.21 And in 1993 it made sense
that Wolf would write this, for women and especially feminists had
made unprecedented gains.
Despite popular declarations of feminism s demise, women were orga-
nizing again and voting with their pocketbooks. Organizations such as
EMILY s List a national network of political donors that began seven
years earlier with a gathering of twenty-five women with Rolodexes in
founder Ellen Malcolm s basement had helped elect four new pro-choice
Democratic women senators and twenty new congresswomen.22 (EMILY
stood for Early Money Is Like Yeast. ) Membership in the organization
had grown more than 600 percent in 1992, with more than 23,000 mem-
bers contributing over $6.2 million to recommended candidates giving
new meaning to the power of the purse.23 Indeed, Time magazine declared
1992 the Year of the Woman. (Sniped Senator Barbara Mikulski in re-
sponse to this popular declaration, Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman
makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus.
We re not a fad, a fancy, or a year. 24)
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]