Feminism didn’t really work. Oopsie!
The success of a community is best understood by the health and happiness of its mothers and, in much the same way, the decade in sex is best told by women. The decade-long obsession with celeb affairs is all about the other women — from the jizzy trash to the Angel(ina) — and about the wives who stay or leave. It took the dopey, annoying and barely-STD-acknowledging Sex and the City franchise to convince women of the import of their orgasms. While third-wave feminism made it cool to reclaim domestic hobbies and small-scale creative efforts, very few practical or legal strides have been made since our moms and grandmas were working on it. What we can take from this is that the project of feminism, in this decade, has finally failed.
What is replacing it is a kind of self-determined, feminist non-feminism, a Libertarian individualism. What Carl Jung called “individuation” is close: instead of collectively pursuing the difficult goals of feminism as though they must be won, women and men alike are, and should be, integrating an assumed status of equality into their lives. Instead of rejecting the bad and sexist habits that we sometimes occupy, it’s more gratifying to assess them for ourselves (“Why do I like getting smacked around so much?” “How can we be better parents?” “Why am I so suspicious of babe power?”) than to apply the unrealized ideals of a movement that relied on a sense of victimhood longer than was useful. Rather than demanding only systemic feminism from our bosses, wives and friends, we create and communicate a focus on what is awesome and fun and smart — ultimately a bigger demand than just “feminism.”
The most crucial indicator of an emerging and useful post-feminism is the total lack of specifically feminist heroes. This decade has offered no celebrity feminists: no Steinem, no Sontag, no Paglia. The best feminist writers have become more ghettoized than ever in the 2000s (in lefty mags; in alienating book-length polemics; in universities): the most visible and vocal woman thinker is grossie Ann Coulter, with Female Chauvinist Pigs writer Ariel Levy a quiet, distant second.
What we have now are non-specific feminist heroes. Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman do comedy that’s as gutteral as their male counterparts’ and as revealing of their personal insecurities. Tina Fey uses her 30 Rock character to act out a quasi-pathetic, baby-crazed life-moron with lettuce in her hair, but she also is the show, among the most absurd and funny on TV. Sasha Grey is both a classically debauched porn star and a shit-hot business lady. Dude bible Vice is all about screwing hot Japanese girls with cool shoes, but it’s understood throughout that women are friends: in their new best-of book, editor Amy Kellner and contributor Lesley Arfin write, “We get so mad when some nitwit says she’s not a feminist. I guess if you’re cool with being raped all the time and having no options in life other than being a baby machine or a prostitute, then yeah, you’re probably not a feminist.” Word, to both the sentiment and the decidedly individuated, fuck-you-too delivery.
Best and most sneakily, personal blogs, Twitter and Facebook have been doing the work that never happened in the samesie-sexist paradigm of mainstream media in the '00s, more effectively implementing a genuinely feminist dialogue. Women are compelled to tell their own stories of sex dirt, menstrual woes and pregnancy, addictions and husbands and hook-ups and make-ups and parents and race and class and freedom. As the opportunity for self-expression expanded, women have responded, agreeing or criticizing or getting into it, casting off an imposed idea of “sisterhood” in order to relate emotionally or intellectually to women, to men, to whomever, based on ideas and insight and style. The same thing, this panoply of perspective, brings men into the fold of feminism, often men who were already there but didn’t really know it.
This is all still a burgeoning thrust of attitude and action. There isn’t such a thing as a girl Superbad, a girl Jason Bourne, or a boy Natalie Portman saving a girl Zach Braff: the big story is still all about our empowerment and helping-healing prowess, not our identities or adventures. We don’t climb fences or stay desirable when we’re failed, drunken messes. Even if we’re funny and brillz we still have to be cute. We get paid shit and don’t do much cool, scary stuff in science or corporate or government. This is fucking boring, dig? Just as boring as relying on a tired and abandoned model of dealing with it.
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