Post-Backlash Feminism
by Kellie Bean (McFarland & Co., 2007)
Welcome! Check out my latest post-backlash tweets...
Excerpt from Post-Backlash Feminism
from the Conclusion
And so, women live in a state of cognitive dissonance, for the cultural messages are mixed. Women write that feminism is passé, while other women label themselves feminist, and argue against feminism’s most familiar views. Moreover, when we look around, women seem to have arrived; they’re everywhere. Women host news shows, report on the most important events of the past decades, like Chechnya, Darfur, 09/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, etc.; women are among the wealthiest individuals in the world; women write and sell book after book; women (sometimes) appear on the most prestigious Op-Ed pages in the country. In fact, the editorial page of my local newspaper often features more women’s by-lines than men’s. It’s no surprise, then, that my students often wonder why I still insist on talking about feminism. Because, as I tell them, while women may enjoy an increased presence in the media as anchors, reporters, and commentators (have you seen ESPN lately?), air time and column inches devoted to women’s issues have been shrinking.
While we may be disappointed that women have participated in the parsing of feminism into near meaninglessness, we must remember that the gender of the messenger is less indicative of cultural trends than the message itself. We must not assume that all women embrace the term “feminism” for the betterment of women’s political status; too often, the term is deployed as a lure, a distraction away from a regressive message harmful to women’s politics. Too often, a conservative, even misogynist, endorsement of the status quo is marketed as a new and improved feminism. All women are not feminists; gender and ideology are not equivalent. So, we may see plenty of female faces on television and read plenty of female by-lines in print, but increased numbers of women reporters does not mean increased reporting on issues of concern to women. Female editorialists, for instance, do not necessarily articulate positions of benefit to women—although that is not what media conservatives and anti-feminists would have us believe. We saw this same logic applied when the number of women in college outstripped the number of men (about 57% or so to 43%). Surely, the conservative media argued, since women have overrun American campuses, college curricula must be equally skewed. And we heard the now-familiar refrain: feminists can stop worrying; women should back off and let the men back into the fold. The fact is, enrollment statistics have little to do with university curricular decision making. American universities have not introduced radical shifts away from male-dominated scholarship, and they have not overturned centuries of patriarchal dominance over the production of knowledge and higher education. What’s happening is simply that now more women than men are studying the same male-defined content. Despite the successes of the women’s movement, American popular culture (like American universities) consistently bends toward misogyny.
And, I would argue, cynicism. For prefix feminisms cynically invokes “choice” to explain personal and private inclinations and to depict the more socially conscious variations of feminism as outdated, irrelevant or unhip. This heavy-handed rhetorical move draws on the feminist issue of choice and suggests that feminism has freed women to make decisions, like whether to learn to pole dance, or use botox, wear low-rise jeans or belly shirts. Of course, these kinds of choices do not represent feminist “choice” at all. Feminist choice always refers to reproductive rights, not ordinary decisions made in the course of every day lives. Reducing women’s very serious—and sometimes very dangerous—pursuit of political and private control over their own bodies in this way ignores much of the history of the women’s movement and belies a fundamental indifference (perhaps hostility) to its goals. Further, these invocations of choice inherently demean the feminist commitment to social justice, which includes empowering women to control their own bodies in safety, challenging systemic sexism and improving the lives of the poor, under insured, abused, and needy. Prefix feminisms further belittle feminist goals in their divide-and-conquer approach to women’s politics; for a red thread running through them all is the assumption that no matter what women choose the old feminism will disapprove. As Katha Pollitt so nicely puts it in The Nation, within American popular culture, “Whatever women are doing wrong is feminism’s fault.” Take, for example, a recent development, the very unserious media-generated scandals dubbed “the Mommy Wars,” which in fact are mere reruns of the arguments characterizing the backlash of the 1980’s: conservative career women, well-paid and thoroughly nannied-up, who don’t clean their own homes or pack school lunches, making a killing writing that women (other women) ought to stay at home for the good of the children and the family. This recent media scam aims to make women feel guilty for any other choice they might make regarding family, work, and children and then blames feminism for this guilt.
The media version of feminist politics lays all things lost or gained for women at the feet of feminism. The seamless (il)logic of anti-feminism renders feminism responsible for the smallest mistakes women make, and any misfortune that might befall them; it also argues that feminists are hyper-critical of any successes women enjoy, or fun they might have. Feminism freed women to strip, and it is feminism’s fault if they are criticized for doing so; feminism freed women to choose to stay home, and feminism consistently makes women feel bad for doing just that; feminism made women free to remain single, and now its feminism’s fault that the (traditional) family is in decline. It is a sealed-system, an argument wherein women circle inevitably back toward disempowered status via the old fashioned feminism. “[N]o success” for women, as Gaby Wood writes in the Guardian, “without its shadow of failure.” And, therefore, she continues, “no impression of choice without an accompanying sense of sacrifice.” Women today live with the sad truth that conservative notions of gender have always characterized our culture, and when challenges to these notions begin to gain political ground new strategies will emerge to quash them.