They’re not stupid girls
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Vivienne Wynter
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Vivienne Wynter's biography and other articles by this writer
Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back,
What a paparazzi girl, I don't wanna be a stupid girl,
Baby if I act like that, flipping my blonde hair back,
Push up my bra like that, I don't wanna be a stupid girl.
In the clip for her song Stupid Girls, spiky-haired twenty-six-year-old American singer Pink (real name Alecia Moore) mocks her celebrity contemporaries: pop singer Jessica Simpson, actor Lindsay Lohan and heiress Paris Hilton. In the video clip, Pink - who calls herself a feminist - sends up Simpson's bikini car-wash video clip, Lohan's famously bad driving and Hilton's vacant paparazzi smile.
"In the '50s, women were supposed to just smile and stay in the kitchen. Now we're supposed to just smile and run around and look sexy. The big difference is, instead of men telling us to do this, we're doing it to ourselves," a clearly frustrated Pink told the New York Daily News last year.
She's not the only one who feels that the current crop of young women have taken the status of women backwards. Australian feminist Anne Summers will tell anyone who'll listen that we have reached "the end of equality". Body Shop founder Anita Roddick has criticised pop stars like Beyoncé and Kylie Minogue for portraying sex work, lap dancing and what Roddick calls a "pimp or whore" culture as cool and sexy. And in March this year, Germaine Greer gave Australian women a serve for not protesting about a television ad for Holden four-wheel drives that poked fun at men for lusting after cars and women. "How much humiliation are you women up for?" Greer asked at an International Women's Day function on the Gold Coast.
The message from feminist activists from the '60s, '70s and '80s is that young women today are letting the team down. Just as Summers famously accused my age group of Generation X-ers of dropping the feminist baton, now the female members of Generation Y are criticised for using and abusing the freedoms won by the warriors of the first and second waves of feminism.
As a lecturer in journalism at two Queensland universities over the past five years, I've spent a lot of time with Gen Y women. My impression is that the reality of being a young woman in the new millennium is more about complex value shifts than turning back the equality clock as some of the older feminists simplistically imply. It is true that most of these women don't call themselves feminists and don't wish to ally themselves with feminism, but there are many indicators that young women have absorbed feminist messages and are living feminist lives.
THE SUCCESSES OF FEMINISM SOWED THE SEEDS of its failure, argues Generation X-er Rebecca Huntley, author of The World According to Y (Allen & Unwin, 2006). Huntley believes "Y women" take gender equality for granted. "Young men and women have internalised feminism to such an extent that many of them question its relevance as a social movement."
It's a relevance thing. My father served in World War II and used to get frustrated because I didn't recall the details of war history the way he did. I told him: "I wasn't there. I don't engage with it like you do because you lived through it." Gen Y women did not live through the second wave of feminism; for many of them, it has passed into history.
Very few young Australian women today realise that thirty or forty years ago a woman could not get served in a public bar in Queensland - that Sigrid Thornton's mother, Merle, chained herself to the bar of the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane to highlight this injustice - or that women could not get a bank loan without their husband's signature and had to resign from the public service if they married.
The history of feminism as a social movement is heavily embedded in the social studies and civics sections of school curricula, but it's an optional study stream along with the history of race relations, the environment movement and unions. A friend who teaches at a prominent Brisbane high school tells me that most teachers choose not to teach feminism and most students choose not to do their assignments on it. Does that lack of knowledge mean feminism has failed? The current bad image of feminism is all about the fictional hairy-legged man-hating lesbian, not the glamorous feminists like Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf - not to mention Doctor Greer, who was a bit of a hottie when she posed nude on the cover of Oz magazine.
As someone who was a feminist activist throughout the 1990s - campaigning for improved portrayal of women in the media - I reckon we should not get too hung up on the labelling or image of feminism. The truth is: feminism worked. It took. And the way young women are living today is the evidence. There is still a long way to go, but we should recognise and celebrate the effects of feminism on young women today.
A few years ago, the Demos Foundation in the United Kingdom did a massive survey of what they called the "Seven Million" generation - the seven million people in the United Kingdom aged between eighteen and thirty-four. Their report was called No Turning Back: Generations and the Genderquake, and it found that "the cultural and economic enfranchisement of women is deep rooted and irreversible": "The advance of women in our culture and parts of the economy is shifting the debate away from the assumptions both of defenders of more traditional values and of an earlier generation of feminists. An older agenda of rights ... is being superseded by a much more complex set of issues: overwork for some, underwork for others, discrimination against men as well as women, sexual harassment by women as well as men; coping with cultural barriers to male adaptation as well as the remaining barriers for women."
The study found that British values have been feminised to the extent that core values can readily be identified as feminine. Surveys of schoolgirls in the United Kingdom found they have greater self-esteem, are happier than their male peers, are more ambitious, are more likely to want to continue in education, and are less likely to want to start a family when they leave school than boys.