"Women had come so far," or so the thinking went, that "we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny." If male chauvinist pigs "regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves."First of all, doesn't anyone read "Fear of Flying" anymore? Well, everyone read it when it came out, and I can assure you that the Erica Jong character in that book, after pursuing the "zipless f**k" for 300 pages, finally gets the opportunity and realizes it's a bad idea. ("My zipless f**k! My stranger on the train! Here I'd been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me!") So what's with this "even Erica Jong" business?
Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: "Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love . . . that is not liberation." It isn't? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she "used to get so hurt" after a night of sex that didn't yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: "I'm like a guy," she brags.
How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl "resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping--sexy." There seems to be a contradiction here.
Second of all, doesn't anyone remember the Andrea Dworkin/Catharine MacKinnon era anymore? There was a whole theme back then about how pro-sex liberals were ruining feminism (and how real feminism had to be very hostile pornography). There's an indignant little anthology from 1990 called "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism." Feminists have been fighting forever about whether to be pro- or anti- sex or something in between.
It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word "modesty" within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as "backtracking," they only help to perpetuate the "raunch culture"--even as they deplore its effects.Hmmm.... I wonder who's going to buy Ms. Levy's book? There doesn't seem to be anything new here about feminism -- which it apparently distorts ridiculously. Maybe the intended reader is the virtuous, puritanical sort who finds these lame sex stories exciting.
Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male "friends" of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say "no way!" but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.
The author of the linked opinion piece (from the WSJ) is Wendy Shalit, who, we're told, wrote a book called "A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue."
Well, I'm sure Shalit encounters plenty of feminists who don't like her word "modesty," but her assumption that they have bought into a Playboy vision of free sex is absurd. They just hear social conservatism in that word. It's quite possible to reject social conservatism without falling into some exaggerated libertinism. Shalit's title advocates going back to old-fashioned values, so it's no wonder most feminists balk. They rightly want new ways to think about what is good for women, not a re-insertion into the old set-up.
And as for that "Exorcist" imagery: that's a pretty old cliché. Can we have something fresh?
Posts
14 comments:
Assuming a definition of feminism as simply the belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes, I still say that if one is seeking a paradigm of anti-feminism, it can readily be found in the relationships between Bill Clinton, the employees he sexually exploited, his enabling spouse, and the millions of self-styled "feminists" who gave him a pass on committing sexual harassment because they, themselves, found Bill Clinton to be cute and attractive -- that, and/or they found it advantageous to themselves for him to be kept in power.
My guess is that the problem stems from a denial of what "sex" really "is."
Jim: I certainly don't think there is one right answer in feminism. I consider it a very inclusive term. I wouldn't put modifiers like "pro-sex" in front of the word if I thought there was only one kind.
LeeOnTheRoad
I think that it is more than just human rights. I would add empowerment, and I would include, in addition to what we are talking about today, yesterday's discussion on working.
Maybe here the distinction is between being able to be more promiscuous because of birth control and loss of societal shame on the one hand, and the power to decide whether this is what a woman really wants for herself on a personal level.
Ah yes, the feminist sex wars . . .
I am going to stray off topic, yet not entirely off topic.
One unifying factor amongst the cohort of young women (under 30) who find themselves publishing books on cultural criticism is that they are almost invariably smoking hot (google them and see).
I remember fondly from a few years back Wendy Shalit's Books TV appearance pushing her Modesty book and indeed she was tastefully festooned in a pastel, just slightly too tight, sweater and adorned with tasteful jewelry and perfect makeup. They played her piece back to back with Elizabeth Wurtzel rambling and shambling about her Bitch book, and looking attractive in a disheveled, disreputable sort of way.
I have a strong suspicion that publishers have in mind the book tour when they ok these books and they don't want unattractive women scolding people about socio-sexual matters. Or it could simply be that attractive people are automatically more credible when discussing sexuality (humankind are simple beasts at our core; pretty good, ugly bad)
Whether these choices are conscious or not by the publisher I have no way of knowing, but the end result does seem to be consistent.
Leroy: This is an excellent point. There is a longstanding phenomenon here -- Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf. Then there are the super-ugly feminist writers: Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin were working a look too.
Then there are the super-ugly feminist writers: Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin were working a look too.
Argggggh! Someone had to go and mention the late Andrea Dworkin. Inevitable, really, given the topic, but still.
She once came to my University and posters advertised that she would be holding an informal talk at Freud Café, which is where all the gliterati would go for informal sessions with pseudo-intellectual students like me.
Oh my God.
What torture that was to listen to her rabbit on about how marriage is legalised rape, and any number of mind-numbing inanities which Julia Kristeva said better anyway.
She then said something similar to this quote of hers:
Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.
After her umpteenth harangue on men v. women in history, I finally raised my hand to challenge that her assertion woman has been victimised or infantalised by misogynists in every period of Western History.
How can she say women have always had a secondary and derivative role in the whole history of mankind, and yet reconcile the High Middle Ages ideal of womanhood, where the concept of romantic love was PREDICATED on a man never ever physically "owning" woman, but rather of putting his chosen lady on a pedestal, and treating himself as her servant of life and limb, to the exclusion of all other earthly women?
Not because of sexual dominance, mind you, but in fact, based on never possessing her bodily.
Did she not know that tradition, popularly thought to have started via Duke William of Aquitane (the father of Queen Eleanor), but in truth derived from a combination of the then Spanish Court, and its
interaction with Moorish and Jewish cultures [note: she had made some remarks earlier in her talk about Jewish culture, from which Christianity took its lead, as especially misogynist]?
Furthermore, it is this ideal which has inspired the canon of
male-female interaction since in the West as an IDEAL, including(for her ilk) the hateful Victorian era?
She mumbled a response, never fully rebutting my question.
In England, people like a good verbal skirmish, especially with sacred cows, and I rather got the idea she was more used to the American academic way of her "supporters" drowning out any dissension in the ranks.
There was less of that there that day, although various girls in the audience (wearing the almost de rigueur Birkenstocks and nose-rings) looked daggers at me.
Bah.
I realise she was a polemicist and often said things for effect, but she is one of the reasons I never could call myself a feminist.
I daresay many of my generation had the same reservations...
Cheers,
Victoria
I will posit a hypothesis;
Smoking hot feminist; published by commercial concerns.
Stern, scolding, man-hating, aggressively unattractive feminist; published by university presses.
(just a guess, I'm not inclined to research this topic farther(in otherwords no force on this planet will get me to voluntarily seek photos of Dworkin, or Friedan)
I think there is a socio-economic dynamic at work. Commercial interests know that sex sells, as does sexiness. Academic circles have an outsized need to prove their "seriousness" (and yet that need for seriousness is also a commercial concern) and what better way to prove you are serious about feminism but to foreground seriously unattractive women (who are not only less attractive by birth, but also by design)
Diane,
The problem, as I see it, of flaunting your sex in the work place is that there are men there. If there weren't, what would be the point?
The problem is that a lot of men cannot separate sexy looking from sexy acting. They see you in your sexy outfit. They get horny. And they cease to think of your brain, but rather your physical attributes. And they lust after you.
I would suggest that the concept of being able to safely dress as sexy as you would like for work in a coed environment is a feminist fantasy. A lot of women can separate their looks from their sexuality. Adn that seems to be the theory here - that men should be able to also. But, by and large, they can't. Or at least most younger men can't. The older you get, the easier it is.
I like my girlfriend's theory - she doesn't show cleavage except out on a date with a guy she has been seeing for awhile. In other words, in a situation where there are no mixed messages.
The other thing that you need to remember is that not only does the appearance of an attractive woman showing off her attributes cause a lot of men to get sexually excited, but they also resent it.
So, if you do that, you will be faced with suspicion from a lot of men - did you get where you are because you are good? Or because of showing off your attributes? Or, even, who did you sleep with?
The other thing that you need to remember is that not only does the appearance of an attractive woman showing off her attributes cause a lot of men to get sexually excited, but they also resent it.
True. Because in these men's minds, they could never compete with their bosses, versus a woman who is so brazenly coquettish at work.
This would all be solved if men just came to work in Speedos.
Level the playing field, I say!
Cheers,
Victoria
I don't think you really want to see that many men over 30 in Speedos.
Here's another take on all this, "Feminist Catfight: The Sluts vs. The Prudes. (Is There A Third Way?)"
A female boss is even less problem—I love women. I worship at the alter of womanhood, and most women sense this about me. I usually ignore men when there are women in the room. Most women like that.
Weird. I could never think like this.
Sometimes though, before I even open my mouth, I sense antagonism from many women towards me.
But these are almost usually women of "a certain age", who struggled during less equal times.
If there's anything they seem to dislike, unless you remind them of a younger them, is an athletic, intelligent, and competent younger gal with a face that isn't god-awful, around them.
OTOH, and I was discussing this with my mother the other day -- black ladies love me.
Not sure why, but whenever I see a black woman behind a cashier, or as a waitress, or as a bank teller, they bend over backwards to help me.
I don't do anything special. I treat male, female, black, white, the same. *shrug*
Cheers,
Victoria
Men are a mystery to me
Diane, you are the first woman I've ever heard say something like that.
Most men haven't the foggiest about women. Most women think they have men all figured out.
I don't claim to know all the ins-and-outs of the male psyche, but let's just say, I share that opinion.
Cheers,
Victoria
Post a Comment