Apparently, there’s nothing more fun than a feminist cat-fight — especially when it’s set up by a feminist author.
Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, reviews a new biography of Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley-Brown, and uses it as an opportunity to declare young, fun feminists “the winners” in the feminism wars.
“Sex and the Single Girl,” Brown’s brash, breezy and sometimes scandalous young-woman’s guide to thriving in the Mad Men and Playboy era, made headlines the year before Friedan’s severe, profound manifesto burst onto the scene. Since then, the media and the women’s movement itself have put these two icons in opposition, pitting Friedan’s intellectual, ideological, group-oriented feminism against Brown’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, girl-power style. They contrast the Seven-Sisters-educated, brainy, politically serious Friedan with the working-class, aspirational and funny Brown, who claimed that a woman could be happy whether single or married, that she could have sex on her own terms, and that she should refuse to see herself as a victim and have fun.
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And guess what? In the long battle between the two styles of feminism, Brown, for now, has won. Just look at the culture around us. Ms. Magazine, the earnest publication that defined feminism in the 1970s and ’80s, has been replaced on college women’s dorm room shelves by sexier, sassier updates such as Bitch and Bust. The four talented, smart — and feminist — women of “Sex and the City,” who are intent on defining their own lives but are also willing to talk about Manolos and men, look more like Brown’s type of heroine than “Sisterhood Is Powerful” readers. The stereotype of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland.
So instead of boring stuff like Women’s Studies classes, today’s feminists are interested in sex toys — while the old-lady feminists are walking around with their Birkenstocks and hairy armpits.
Don’t we get this kind of dumbed-down narrative enough whenever mainstream media covers feminism? Do we really need a feminist regurgitating it?
Of course, in the real world, younger women are also involved in academia and grassroots activism, and older women are culturally engaged and sexual. The author of Gurley Brown’s biography is a professor of Women’s Studies at Bowdoin — one of those asexual Amazons who also writes about a sexual revolutionary. Funny how our actual lives don’t fit so neatly into generational stereotypes.
But then Wolf manages to take a swipe at younger feminists, too:
But that very individualism, which has been great for feminism’s rebranding, is also its weakness: It can be fun and frisky, but too often, it’s ahistorical and apolitical. As many older feminists justly point out, the world isn’t going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered, if they don’t have grass-roots groups or lobbies to advance woman-friendly policies, help women break through the glass ceiling, develop decent work-family support structures or solidify real political clout.
Feminism had to reinvent itself — there was no way to sustain the uber-seriousness and sometimes judgmental tone of the second wave. But feminists are in danger if we don’t know our history, and a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make.
…right. Because younger women aren’t mobilizing or creating positive change in their communities. We’re just getting lower back tattoos and having lots of sex. Next.