The newest Carnival of the Feminists is up at Diary of a Freak Magnet. Ginger has done a terrific job assembling a fine collection of posts. Happy reading!
Archive for the 'Feminism' Category
In my post last Friday celebrating the 160th anniversary of the Declaration of Sentiments, I quoted this line from that most worthy of feminist documents:
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
I noted that our feminist foremothers at Seneca Falls were not just concerned with the issue of poltical rights and public justice, but with the world of private emotion. These foremothers knew, and knew very well, that a movement that concerns itself only with winning political rights, but not with the emotional well-being of an oppressed class, ends up fighting only half the battle. Hence I wrote, riffing off the lines from the Declaration above:
The personal is indeed political, and even more importantly, politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal. Public freedom is a good, but so too is private happiness. And feminism, at its glorious and transformative best, is concerned with winning both — for women, yes, but, ultimately for all of us.
John Spragge makes a pair of criticisms below that orignal post, taking issue with my reading of the Declaration and my suggestion that the Seneca Falls conventioneers were willing to make personal concerns a central aspect of their agenda. John writes:
Politics exists to manage the public square, the shared spaces where we meet. But if the same politician promises to make me happy or make me good, we have a problem. Politics stops at my skin.
I certainly am not suggesting we form an Orwellian federal Department of Happiness that ensures that each citizen has a strong sense of well-being. But the fact is that unhappiness of the kind the declaration describes –an abject dependence, a lack of self-respect, a dearth of self-confidence — doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Though some unhappiness may be a result of poor personal decisions, or a result of some sort of familial abuse, or due to organic factors in the brain, a great deal of the kind of unhappiness that the Declaration laments is a direct result of public policies and social mores that treat women very differently from men. Continue reading ‘The political, the personal and regulating the minimum BMI for supermodels: another response to John Spragge’
This Sunday, July 20, will mark the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Most historians choose to mark the beginning of the organized American feminist movement from this moment, which had its antecedents in the abolitionist and temperance struggles that had begun earlier in the nineteenth century. (Parenthetically, I’m feeling old: it seems like five minutes ago that I was talking to my summer school students about the 150th anniversary. Ten years have flown by.)
The Declaration is elegant, powerful, and beautiful. Modeled in part on the Declaration of Independence, the document sets forth a list of the various ways in which a male dominated society has deprived women of what is naturally theirs, just as Jefferson’s declaration contained a long list of grievances against the British Crown. And though many issues were on the table at the Seneca Falls convention, the document makes clear that three causes, above all others, were of paramount concern:
1. The Right to Vote
2. The Right to Own Property
3. The Right to Education.
None who signed the document in 1848 would live long enough to see all of these rights won, though we can say with some satisfaction that for the vast majority of American women today, what were once distant goals are now common-place reality. But I always point out to my students that the Declaration of Sentiments wasn’t just concerned with winning political rights for women. It was also a call to transform how women thought about themselves. The last of the grievances listed:
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
In other words, three hallmarks of patriarchal and misogynistic culture are a lack of self-confidence, an absence of self-respect, and an unwillingness on the part of women and girls to embrace independence from men. Read positively, our foremothers at Seneca Falls, eight score years ago, saw that real liberation was not merely about providing political, economic, and educational rights for women — though of course, those rights were indispensable. Real liberation had to be internal as well as external. And what the framers of the Declaration knew was that real freedom for women would and could only come when a culture had been created that was as psychologically empowering as it was politically egalitarian.
Winning rights has proven easier than changing cultural values. The popular culture, with its tyrannical insistence on female physical perfection, has undermined the confidence of (by now) several generations of young American women. The pressure to live up to impossibly high familial and societal expectations has robbed just as many of their self-respect. (An old post on “respect” is here). And 160 years after Seneca Falls, after three successive waves of feminism, we still find ourselves combatting cultural forces that promote the most noxious lie of all: that for women, more so than for men, the most profound happiness is always contingent upon a heterosexual relationship that has been blessed with children. We teach women, in countless ways, the lie that dependency is liberation, that true freedom lies in sublimating your own wants to that of another. We still teach far too many women that the pursuit of self-sufficiency is a recipe for loneliness and isolation, and that in order to have meaning and purpose for one’s life, one must be willing to surrender completely to love and its dictates.
Self-confidence, self-respect, and independence (emotional and economic) are vital feminist concerns. It was 160 years ago on Sunday that the framers of the Declaration of Sentiments first centered these three goals in the struggle for women’s freedom. And though the political goals of 21st century feminism have changed quite a bit from those of 1848, the essential struggle for women’s self-confidence, self-respect, and independence continues. The personal is indeed political, and even more importantly, politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal. Public freedom is a good, but so too is private happiness. And feminism, at its glorious and transformative best, is concerned with winning both — for women, yes, but, ultimately for all of us.
On Sunday, raise a glass to the women (and their many male allies) who came together 160 years ago this weekend to launch a movement whose achievements have transformed our world for the better, and though the struggle may yet be long, whose final victory is assured.
I wrote a post last November about the very positive reception my students had given to Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti’s immensely popular and useful primer and polemic.
Now that I’ve assigned the book to several different classes, I’ve had a chance to collect a wider variety of reactions. Happily, the responses of my students to Valenti’s text remain uniformly positive, or very nearly so. And perhaps not surprisingly, one particular section of FFF continues to elicit the most impassioned reactions. In November 2007, I quoted this short section:
I’ve had more than a couple of embarrassing moments in my life and sexual history — but isn’t that what makes us who we are? Do we really have to be on point and thinking politics all the time? Sometimes doing silly, disempowering, sexually vapid things when you’re young is just part of getting to the good stuff.
That resonated with my students then, and it resonates now. I had some great in-class discussions about this particular passage in my spring class, and got some marvelous journal responses as well. And the real meaning of those three sentences is deeper than may first appear. One of the most salient of Jessica Valenti’s points is that the dominant narrative, the one that suggests that poor choices in puberty (particularly poor sexual choices made by girls) will “ruin your life”, is largely a false one. Continue reading ‘Against anxiety: of Full Frontal Feminism, the vapid recklessness of youth, and the reminder of the salutary effects of dirt’
It’s taken me far too long, but I finally finished Deborah Siegel’s immensely engaging Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Deborah is a wonderful writer, and she’s produced the most readable summary of the last forty years of intra-feminist conflict that I’ve seen in print. I may find a way to work it into a syllabus sometime in the next year or two.
At times, Siegel visits a similar theme to the one Astrid Henry explored in Not My Mother’s Sister, a book I reviewed here. Read together, Henry and Siegel offer a sobering account of how the conflict between so-called “Second” and “Third” wave feminists emerged and has continued to play out. Both books were, of course, written well before Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House formally began, but the issues raised by her campaign make the two texts (particularly, perhaps, Siegel’s) seem positively prescient.
But what I was keenly aware of as I finished Deborah’s book was the degree to which intra-generation feminist conflict facilitates male privilege. Specifically, it facilitates my privilege as a male gender studies professor.
I don’t spend a lot of time in my women’s studies classes dwelling on my own maleness. I may have a robust ego, but I draw the line at a kind of pedagogical narcissism that invites the students to reflect at length on their feelings about the professor. Still, there’s no point ignoring my maleness, any more than there’s any point ignoring my whiteness or my age. We teach, after all, as embodied persons. All those who can see or hear (and all of my students can do at least one of these tasks) can sense that a man is teaching women’s studies. I’m not the only man in academia doing it (read my tribute to David Allen), but I am the only one doing it at Pasadena City College. It’s appropriate to create a forum where students can question whether a man can or should be teaching feminism to a predominantly female class, and I try and do that at least once a semester. Continue reading ‘“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict’
Reminder: This is a feminist blog. Comments are welcome, but comments need to be “feminist-friendly”. Contrarians whose primary contribution is to ask “What about the menz” in one form or another may do so elsewhere, please.
Inviting National Review editor Katherine Jean Lopez and right-wing author Kathleen Parker to discuss feminism together is a bit like asking Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah Khomeini to teach a seminar on the French Enlightenment. Whatever gets said, there ain’t gonna be much good.
It’s a confusing discussion. On the one hand, Parker trots out the tired old saw of gender essentialism:
Boys and girls are hard-wired differently, which one notices as soon as the little critters become mobile. Although there are exceptions, girls can sit and focus for long periods and boys need to move around more. In fact, brain research shows that multitasking stimulates the pleasure center of women’s brains, hence 42 years of NOW. The men’s movement has been in gestation for 15 years and hasn’t begun to quicken yet. Ultimately, letting men be men means not insisting that they be our best girlfriends.
I wonder how Kathleen Parker explains the feats of memory undertaken by Torah students for three millenia, who do relatively little moving around and learn with dutiful exactness? Or how the Chinese civil service survived nearly as long with a nearly all-male membership, made up of fellows who spent hours not only committing the law to memory, but learning how to shape complex characters? How could they have done these things, when it is so “natural” for boys and men to be easily distracted and in need of constant physical exertion? Continue reading ‘Feminism, shame, and boys: responding (again) to Kathleen Parker and KJ Lopez’
Both Jessica Valenti and Jill Filipovic are quoted in this Linda Hirshman piece in today’s Washington Post: Looking to the Future, Feminism has to Focus. It’s a strange piece, not least because it begins with the tenuous suggestion that Hillary Clinton’s failure to capture the Democratic nomination is evidence that feminism is not as viable a political movement as it ought to be. Having started out on an angst-ridden note, however, Hirshman notes that “millenials” (those born between 1977 and 1996) are “re-engaging with feminism”, and notes the “wonderful defiant” quality of Valenti’s writing.
There’s a brief — too brief — summary of the whole post-WAM fiasco too, and then a rueful, if self-indulgent acknowledgment of the perhaps oversold, but surely not illusory generation gap in feminism:
I started out feeling very lukewarm toward Clinton, but every time someone on cable television called her a bitch or a pimp, my interest in her candidacy went up. A lot of the feminists for Obama were also horrified at the tone of the Clinton coverage, but they maintained that you could be mad at Chris Matthews and Tim Russert and Alex Castellanos and the guys on the Internet and in your office but still support Obama. I am, as my young feminist friends and Obama supporters keep reminding me, old.
I hear ya, Linda.
I intend to vote for Barack Obama in the fall. Though John McCain was the class of the Republican field, holding a few key sensible positions (particularly on climate change) that differentiate him from the Club-For-Growth-pod-people who control most of the GOP, his positions on women’s issues and the war make him an unattractive candidate.
But in my heart of hearts, I’d rather have Hillary Clinton. I loved her speech yesterday, and the women’s studies professor in me was delighted with the deft primer she gave on the women’s movement.
Much discussion today of Rebecca Walker’s piece in the Daily Mail: How My Mother’s Fanatical Feminist Views Tore us Apart. Rebecca, daughter of Alice Walker (of the “Color Purple” and many other important feminist works) excoriates her mother in the Mail interview, done to promote (of course) her new book.
…my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa - offering herself up as a mother figure.
But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.
The publishing industry regularly proves right Freud’s theory about children’s murderous desires towards their parents. We have ooodles and ooodles of “tell-all” books written by the kids of the famous, in which they invariably “shatter the illusion” of the (usually same-sex) parent’s marvelous public persona. Folks never tire of buying the latest in the “Everyone-thought-Mum-was-God-but-to-me-and-my-pet-rabbit-she-was-Satan” genre, and Rebecca Walker offers us her version this spring. The hook, of course, is that Rebecca doesn’t just blame Alice — she blames feminism. Continue reading ‘After 25, it’s in bad taste to blame your parents for anything: some thoughts on Rebecca and Alice Walker, feminism, and the rage of the neglected child’
Jessica Valenti’s second book is out: He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. Much like her first book, the much-celebrated Full Frontal Feminism, He’s a Stud is deceptively light and quick reading. Jessica’s easy, colloqial style disguises some sharp and much-welcome social analysis of some 50 famously frustrating double standards.
Talk to any group of young women for a while, and you’ll hear laments about the various double standards that privilege men and punish women. Besides the obvious sexual double standard that gives Valenti’s book its title, separate and cruel paradigms about everything from body size to singleness abound, with one unifying characteristic: men, in virtually all respects, have it easier.
One of my least favorite double standards is one I’ve seen often in the vegan and animal rights world, what Valenti labels “He’s an Activist, She’s a Pain in the Ass”. She writes:
While men who work for change are revered and admired, women who do the same are often scoffed at, dismissed, or outright hated.
This is a theme that Jessica returns to several times; while men are allowed both a vibrant sexuality and the privilege of righteous anger, women are regularly excoriated both for their libidinousness and for “shrill”, “shrewish” activism. Heck, I run into this double standard all the time as a man teaching women’s studies. Time and again, I hear from my students that they appreciate both my passion and my “objectivity”. A typical evaluation I will receive: “I like taking women’s studies from a man because I think men are more fair than women.” Continue reading ‘Of sluts and studs, passion and bitterness: a short review of Jessica Valenti’s new book’
A reader named Gwynn writes:
I’ve been thinking about you recently as my boyfriend and I have been talking about feminism.
He’s 25, I’m 34, but this is not about our age difference per se. A bit before we started dating, I told him I was a feminist, and he took the kind of not-uncommon position something like “well as long as you’re not mad at me personally…” But when we spoke further, I found him very receptive to feminist ideas. He was simply clueless, which isn’t uncommon in either sex, I suppose.
I gave him a bunch of links to read (from this blog and elsewhere).
So everything was great and I’ve been calling him a feminist. But lately he’s admitted he’s not comfortable calling himself a feminist because of his lack of actual education about it, and because he’s afraid someone like his sister or mom will argue with him if he uses that title. And also, feminist stuff is starting to seriously stress him out and sometimes when it comes up, it makes him really miserable, partly from a generic perspective (”the world is really fucked up!”) and partly selfishly.
The way I can approach sympathy for his position is as a white person. Racism is an issue where I’m in the oppressive majority, so I can understand the discomfort that comes with that position. Otherwise I’d probably get truly irritated when he says things like “I just don’t like having so much anger directed at me that I don’t deserve,” etc. I talk him through this stuff as best I’m able.
He’s also freaked out around ideas like “what can I personally do about misogyny?” and “seriously, I can never use the word ‘bitch’ again?” and “do men really have a vested interest in keeping women down?” and “but how does patriarchy benefit me personally?”
I’m not a gatekeeper of feminism. I’m a student of it, like most people. I don’t want to be his feminist authority.
I’m pretty good at answering the questions and challenging him. We had, for instance, a whole discussion in which I convinced him that the position that all heterosexual sex is rape is, while (IMO) wrong, not actually ridiculous. He’s open to everything that I say. He agrees that gender stuff is fucked up. (Of course, he’s especially receptive to arguments about how patriarchy hurts men, but I’m fine with that. I hate how patriarchy hurts men too, and as long as you’re not using that as a way of saying “so shut up, bitches, at least you don’t have to do dangerous jobs”, I’m totally cool with discussing it.)
I wish he had a male feminist mentor of some kind, but I don’t see that happening. I wish he was more well read about it, but he’s been reading “The Republic” for about the past year, which indicates how much time he spends with books and how slow he is at it.
I guess my sort of general question is, without doing all of his work for him, or letting him off the hook, how does a girlfriend help a boyfriend with feminism?
One of the problems in any age-disparate relationship — particularly when the older partner is committed to a spiritual or political ideal about which the younger knows little — is that a kind of complicated mentoring relationship can develop. The younger partner, so often infatuated with the older, can easily associate their new love’s beliefs with the new love himself or herself. In other words, the interest in feminism could (and in Gwynn’s boyfriend’s case, I don’t know for sure) become inextricably linked with Gwynn, and his receptivity to feminism thus rises and falls with the status of the relationhip. That’s always problematic.
But there are two basic issues here: how to get young men to understand — and embrace — feminism, and how can a romantic partner help in that process, if at all? Continue reading ‘Girlfriends, boyfriends, feminism: a long response to “Gwynn”’
I’m sitting in the Stata Center at MIT; I’ve picked up my registration packet for the Women, Action, and Media Conference. My wife, her best buddy Amanda, and I are staying with friends down in Quincy, a few miles south of Cambridge and Boston. It is, not unpredictably, quite cold and rainy. On the drive up to the MIT campus this morning, the outside thermostat on our rented Chevrolet claimed 37 degrees.
We flew in early yesterday morning, and spent much of the day doing the normal touristy things in Boston. I’ve only been in Boston once before, to help film a documentary back in 2005. I spent all of twelve hours in Massachusetts, and five of those in a production studio in Needham, so I don’t really count that as a visit. My wife and Amanda are driving up towards New Hampshire at the moment, but I’m safely indoors for the duration. I’ve got veggie sushi and coffee, so really, there’s nothing else I need. Oh, and I’ve also got MIT’s world-class wireless internet, which seems to be the fastest I’ve ever used.
I’m not presenting anything at this conference, which both simultaneously unnerves and relieves me. It relieves me because, well, I don’t have to get up and give a paper. Though I don’t suffer much from stage fright, I still get nerves at conference presentations when I’m expected to say something really good or interesting. Not having to do anything but be an interested and engaged observer makes things easier. Of course, in another sense, it unnerves me too. When I’m speaking somewhere, I have a context in which to meet people. When I’m somewhere new and not presenting, panel-chairing, or speaking, I have to fight a tendency to disappear. My Myers-Briggs is ENFP, but the E can be awfully tenuous in certain novel situations.
Of course, sometimes I — more than most people — need to shut up and listen. Those of us who teach for a living, particularly those of us who lecture a great deal, risk being enchanted by the sound of our own voices. This is a good time for listening.
I’m looking forward to going to a variety of sessions tomorrow, and I’ll do my best to live-blog some of them. I’ve never live-blogged a conference; back when I first starting going to academic meetings (like the Medieval Association of the Pacific, the first conference I ever went to), not only was no one blogging but no one had cell phones. Nevertheless, we all did a super job of doodling on yellow legal pads while feigning earnest interest in panel discussions on the paleographic differences between Flemish and French medieval monastic hand. I trust that tomorrow’s sessions will be sufficiently challenging and inspiring that there will be no need for any kind of doodling, electronic or otherwise.
I’ll be red-eyeing it out to Boston tonight to attend the Women, Action, and the Media Conference 2008. I’m not presenting, just goin’ to meet and listen and connect and learn.
They promise wireless access, so look for some sort of blogging Friday or Saturday, but the TSP and the FRT will have to wait another week. Regular posting will resume Monday or Tuesday next.
UPDATE:As of April 25, I am suspending my endorsement of this book until a new edition appears. I read this book without more than a cursory glance at the comic images used to illustrate it, images that were deeply offensive and unmistakably racist. Though Amanda Marcotte did not select these images herself, she and the publisher share responsibility for a very unfortunate lapse in judgment. As a result, I cannot in good conscience support the sale of the currently available edition. When a new edition appears — may it be soon — without these indefensible images within its pages, my endorsement will stand.
It took others to point out what I could not see. I am ashamed of that. This review stands in its entirety, with this disclaimer attached.
Last week, It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments arrived on my desk. Amanda Marcotte’s new book from Seal Press is indeed available now, and over the course of the Easter weekend, I made my way through its brief and breezy 235 pages.
Amanda was a leading figure in the feminist blogosphere before she and Melissa McEwan were involved, over a year ago, in the now-infamous John Edwards blogging drama. (Details in this Salon article.) I’ve been reading Amanda since 2004, when she blogged at the now-defunct Mouse Words; since moving to the widely-read Pandagon, she’s become one of the most prolific and best-known of feminist bloggers. She’s also become one of the most controversial, not least for her fierce and occasionally profane perspectives. Despite her rising fame and her book deal(s), Amanda remains legendary for her willingness to comment frequently and thoughtfully on an extraordinary number of lesser-known blogs. I can’t think of many bloggers as well-known as she who do so much to nurture and encourage good feminist writing from all corners and all comers.
“Jungle” is listed (on the back jacket) as “Politics/Humor.” It goes without saying that writing and performing political humor is a tricky business; what one reader finds hilarious another will invariably find offensive or dull. I can’t imagine many people being bored by Amanda’s rapier wit, but I do know her capacity to alienate is formidable. Those already hostile to feminism, or those who are “on the fence” about women’s equality, are not the ideal audience for this rambunctious tour through the minefields that confront young American women today. In any movement, you need great satirists — and winsome apologists. Amanda Marcotte is definitely in the former category. She’s not winsome, she’s not irenic, and her writing isn’t going to make your misogynistic brother-in-law suddenly start donating to Planned Parenthood and start sharing the housework burden for the first time in his life. But for the right reader, “Jungle” will prove an inspiration and a delight. Continue reading ‘Amanda Marcotte’s danceable revolution: on “It’s a Jungle Out There”: UPDATED’
In my Humanities class on “Beauty and the Body”, we’ve been comparing some of the various theories about the etiology of modern eating disorders. It’s a lot of ground to cover: medical models, cultural models, psychological models. (Today, we begin talking about Courtney Martin’s wonderful new book: Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.) It’s a tough class to teach for many reasons, not the least of which is that so much of the material is automatically triggering for some who are already struggling with “body issues.”
Over the last two lectures, I’ve been talking about everything from Western mind/body dualism to the Mosaic law to Sigmund Freud. The basic case is simple: much of our culture, for a variety of historical reasons, teaches us the Gnostic notion that the soul, our truest self, is imprisoned in a corrupt and foul body. The “heavy beast” that is always with us is our flesh, but these voices tell us that the “real self” is somewhere deep inside, an ethereal spirit locked in a corporeal cage. The notion that the body, with all its effluvia and its frailties, is disgusting and offensive is deeply rooted in several strands of the Western tradition. And these strands all contribute to a contemporary culture in which self-denial becomes virtue. After all, to pick the anorectic example, a woman who starves herself to the point that her periods stop and her bowel movements become very infrequent has, in a very real sense, given herself an illusion of mastery and purity. If the body’s demands and emissions are dirty, then self-starvation becomes not only about self-denial but about ritualized cleansing and transcendence. Continue reading ‘No break from the “heavy beast”: on teaching, the body, and the danger of triggering’
Women Thrive Worldwide has launched a new campaign to publicize their fight against global poverty — poverty that so often wears a woman’s face. Hundreds of millions of women survive on about one dollar a day or less; the president of Women Thrive, Ritu Sharma Fox, traveled recently to Nicaragua (one of the poorest countries in our hemisphere) to document what one dollar a day really means. You can read her diary or look at a photo album.
Women Thrive serves as an umbrella organization, uniting more than 50 non-profits (from Lutheran World Relief to the Muslim Women’s Coalition) to advocate for policies that can better the lives of women — and their families — in the poorest countries of the world.
Women Thrive Worldwide has issued a “dollar a day” challenge, asking those who can to consider contributing one dollar a day for a year to the cause of combatting poverty by empowering women. You can donate here.
I’m pleased to blog in support of Women Thrive, and as I do so, I have this Los Angeles Times op-ed by Elizabeth Wurtzel on my brain: Bitter Ashes of Burned Brassieres. I knew I was going to hype Women Thrive this morning, and I had that in the back of my mind as I read this in the paper:
Am I the only one who feels that last week’s news events prove that the women’s movement has failed?
First, the first woman to run for vice president on a major party ticket alienates everybody who the first woman with a real chance to be president hasn’t alienated already. Then we find out that there are prostitutes who are paid $5,500 an hour, and the consolation prize for earning a Harvard law degree is that you get to stand by your husband’s side when he resigns from public office in disgrace. Even worse, because Silda Wall Spitzer is accomplished and beautiful, the whole scene serves as a grim reminder that even amazing women become sexually disposable after a certain age.
Is this the world that feminism hath wrought?
Look, I’m upset about the Ferraro thing for a variety of reasons, and I’ve said my piece about Eliot and Silda Spitzer. But to somehow connect the bitter progressive in-fighting within the Democratic party and the misbehavior of one state’s governor to feminism’s failures seems, well, a wild leap even for Elizabeth Wurtzel. I’ve been a fan of Wurtzel for years; her Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women had moments of stunning insight; more than many of her peers who got book deals in the 1990s, Wurtzel had an uncanny ability to connect her personal struggles to those of women everywhere. And her first book, Prozac Nation, is likely to be read years from now by social historians not yet born, eager to understand middle-class adolescent anxieties in fin-de-siecle America. And as much as I have admired Wurtzel’s work in the past, her op-ed this morning struck me as both confused and silly. Continue reading ‘Defeatism and global change: on “Women Thrive” and a downcast Elizabeth Wurtzel’
Recent Comments