How feminism lost its street cred - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jennifer Mills
POP CULTURE'S SELF-ANALYSIS IS LIMITED TO "WHAT'S HOT" LISTS. Academia doesn't help – the intent study of pop-culture phenomena offers little in the way of evaluating its worth, and cultural studies has mainstreamed gender analysis, making it everyone's subject-matter and no one's project.
British feminist and writer Angela McRobbie points out in her book In the Culture Society (Routledge, 1999) that popular magazines' obsessive how-to guides around sex essentially agree that sexuality is constructed and learned, which is an important step. This is tenuous at best – it does nothing to address the regression to "set" gender roles.
ACADEMIC FEMINISTS HAVE, BY AND LARGE, prematurely abandoned a structural analysis of real social issues such as rape, domestic violence, inequality – and without having effected lasting structural change. So how did feminism lose its street cred? There are three main threads at work here: sexuality, political correctness and a generational shift.
Sex first. What happened to feminist ideals of sexual liberation? We got the anti-porn debates of the 1980s, when Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon in In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (Harvard University Press, 1997) told us pornography was the same as rape and accidentally got themselves censored in the process. What started as an attempt to stop the subordination of women and the commodification of the female body ended up marking a generation of feminists as censors – as anti-sex. It's not hard to see why young women want their bodies back.
But they are still not our bodies. Raunch culture is a display for men – an acceptance of sexuality as women's only source of power. It makes no attempt to talk about oppression, while VICE tells us subordination is what women really want. Perhaps old-school feminism has ceased to be relevant to a lot of people who feel held back by a movement that relied too heavily on "victim mentality" and strict gender identity. By celebrating the misogyny of popular culture, women are reacting against the failures of second-wave feminists, but we are throwing the sisterhood out with the bathwater.
As for political correctness, feminism has been tarred with its brush as well. Since the early 1990s, there has been a backlash against the "politically correct" – a backlash in which the politically just plain wrong are somehow able to claim that they are being victimised by bleeding heart liberals who favour scary policies like equality of opportunity. The victims and the perpetrators have been switched – it's like watching CNN coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But it would be defeatist to blame the rise of the political right for the acceptability of "anti-PC" culture generally. Sure, it plays a part – the right is too scrawny a force here to operate without some support from its team in government – but it's not the whole story.
In fact, the left must also take responsibility for some of its lack of cool. By not fighting against the ideology of PC, feminists took part in a general shift of the left from real force to ethics committee. At some point, we appointed ourselves moral guardians – thus opting out of the actual struggle.
And then there's the generational shift. As the children of Baby Boomers, we've watched the high ideals of the 1960s being replaced by middle-class aspirations, liberation traded for a few nest egg shares. As Catharine Lumby pointed out in Bad Girls (Allen & Unwin, 1997), many women of the Baby Boomer generation do not acknowledge their status as part of the establishment. In addition, conservative feminists like Naomi Wolf have come to be seen as representative because of their accessibility, but haven't actually addressed their position of privilege. To top it off, many of the women writing about young women are now approaching middle age.
This raises one further issue – that of choice. As the feminist project has been dissipated, as it has tried to become everything to every woman (and man), it has spread itself too thinly. The ethics of "choice" are also inextricably linked to a consumer culture. "Girls can do anything" is now a mantra of acquisition, not skill. In this context, empowerment is a measure of what you can get, and sex is your main currency.
It's not all bad news, though. DIY feminism and the effects of riot grrl still resonate for many women, and a lot has changed. Young men are slowly being educated to take responsibility for sexual ethics. But what we really need is a thorough and relevant analysis of gender dynamics that incorporates a spectrum of sexualities. We need a feminism that helps us to navigate the dance floor and other important institutions – one that allows us to reject misogyny without looking like a total dweeboid loser with an acoustic guitar. ♦