No Justice, No Piece

orso_amoroso has sent a link to Susan Faludi on the poisonous generation gap between second and third wave feminists.

It's interesting and depressing. Do-me feminism -- the WonderBra is empowering -- is incredibly damaging and also a self-solving problem. One ceases to be the prettiest girl in the room at a certain point, when you're left with $2500 worth of eye shadow and no parity. This is not power. (I read Germaine Greer's entire seven-pound book on menopause, probably the only person you know who did, and grokked that the entire rant was based on a sexually shaming episode in which the formerly beautiful sex warrior dropped her clothes in front of somebody who made fun of her. So much for power.)

Parity news is bad. Unlike Germaine Greer's perky breasts, nothing has changed in 30 years.

And Slut Machine, formerly of print Bust and now gone cyberat Jezebel, got married, changing the name of her career-making blog from One D At a Time to One D, where there have been no posts since January. It is now protected and she started Mrs. Moz in July. I'm a big fan of hers as a journalist. About the do-me sex I have reservations (see above), as I do the whole Mrs. Moz incarnation. I'm all about being a bad-ass and marriage too, there's nothing about Tracie Egan Morrissey's journey I actually disapprove of; mine wasn't quite as epic as hers sexually, nor did I write about it. Here's a news flash: waking up one morning to see a pistol on my nightstand left there by the current incumbent was pretty much the end of the line for my badass picaresqueism. And the sex was nothing I'm ever going to write home about (with Keef, I claim that I remember it all, no matter what you thought).

But neither hers nor mine is feminist. I think feminism is about good sex, among other things, including bad sex and no sex. Until women control the media, as they do not (I'd be interested in a breakout on women in the executive suites of the new media), feminist sex as represented in the new media the third wave is so proud of "mastering" will be of the Slut Machine variety. (Lots of what you and I secretly know to be D+ sex much marred by the twin fallacies, I'm-so-transgressive and I-am-the-first-EVAR.)

The key being the personal is now cyber feminism, and the young uns are all about wearing fishnets and stilettoes and taunting the old uns. It's my wight to expwess myself! It gets you real credibility and a job, as Mrs. Moz has discovered. But why did she deep six One D at a Time?

Meanwhile, Faludi notes:

The primary hurdles feminism
faces are the enduring ones. Basic social
policies for working mothers are still lacking
and sex segregation in the workplace and the
attendant feminization of poverty have hardly
changed (the top ten full-time jobs for women
in the United States—secretary, waitress,
sales clerk, etc.—are the same as thirty years
ago, and over the course of their prime earning
years women make 38 percent of what
men make); male dominance of public leadership
is still the rule (men occupy 80 to 95-
plus percent of the top decision-making positions
in American politics, business, the
military, religion, media, culture, and entertainment);
sexual and domestic violence remain
at epidemic levels (nearly 20 percent of
American women report having been sexually
assaulted or raped, and 25 percent of women
are physically or sexually attacked by their
current or former husbands and lovers); and
fundamental reproductive freedom is perpetually
imperiled (mounting, onerous legal restrictions;
violent attacks on family-planning
clinics; and no abortion services in more
than 85 percent of U.S. counties).

Nothing has changed. This is as much the fault of the second wave feminists' political tactics as it is the third wave's sellout. Making a living on your back literally has no future in it, and neither does disenfranchised secretary, waitress, sales clerk.

( Here's the piece )

This entry was originally posted at http://purejuice.dreamwidth.org/1519563.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Faludi Part 2

( Part two of the war between the feminists )