If they're the future, Fourth-Wavers can eat me!

Several times in recent posts, I've invoked the term "third-wave feminism," and then committed one of the cardinal sins of critical writing--I didn't stop to define my terminology. So, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Third-wavers. This definition is somewhat more academic and historical than the one that has somewhat congealed in my head. This line ("Third wave feminism seeks to challenge any universal definition of femininity.") comes closest to what I mean when I use the term. But more specifically, inherent in the idea is that a woman should have to concede neither her desires to act and appear outwardly feminine and sexual, or not, nor her desires to be treated equitably in the workplace/classroom/mechanic's station/bank account/board room in order to gain anyone's respect and be free from harassment. In other words, my basic conception of third-wave feminism is that I don't want to have to behave like a man (i.e., live up to a standard of maleness) in order to achieve whatever the goals I set for my life might be. Obviously, the concept is inclusive of much more than this--honoring the experiences of minority women who, not only have to contend with a male standard, but also a white standard, the attempts to reclaim some dirty words (I would argue, however, that we have been less successful than the queers on this front, as "queer" is now a generally acceptable term in polite company, but "cunt" (which etymologically, and ironically, means "sacred cave" (thank you, Jen!)) is not), widespread global activism, etc., etc., etc. But when I use it, I mean to describe women who want to be simultaneously taken seriously as functioning contributors to the culture and taken seriously as sexual beings (not objects-- we'd like to maintain our agency, thank you! Though, it seems, we're still working out the kinks in our sometimes contentious relationship with that "male gaze" business) in whatever way we choose to express our sexuality.

In contrast to this concept, of course, is the second-wave. And while the second-wave laid much of the necessary groundwork for my generation of girl-power-proponents, the problem with their ideology can be easily summarized within the symbol of The Power Suit. This unfortunate item of apparel hit its stride somewhere in the 80s, I guess. Its notable characteristics include massive shoulder pads, wide, boxy jacket style and a complete obfuscation of the female form shivering beneath it. As a free gift with purchase, buyers of power suits received a cold and heartless persona that was supposed to be "manly" (men, if you aren't every bit as offended by that set of assumptions as I am, I'm inclined to feel a little ashamed of you). However, included in the price of the suit was the woman's ownership of her own sexual place in the world. Buy the suit, become an asexual automaton. Quite a deal! Off course, all this hearkens back to my post in which I whined about being chided for my own clothing choices at every job I've ever had. Not every woman wants to be as outwardly feminine as I do, but the ideas that a)I won't be taken seriously as a professional if I am outwardly feminine and b)I am somehow threatening to men? other women? the very foundations of American corporate culture? if I refuse to conceal my sexual persona is an intensely frustrating holdover from second-wave thinking. Hence, I've lit my third-wave torch and will wave it frantically for as long as I can.

And then along comes Wendy Shalit, proclaiming the emergence of the Fourth Wave. First she wrote A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue and now she's just released Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good. To be fair, I don't have much of an intention to read either one of these books. But I did enjoy this pointed review of the latter book. As Deborah Siegel notes in this article, Shalit tries to blame permissive baby-boomer parents for the oversexualization of women of my generation and younger. I really don't want to discuss five-year-olds who dress up like my girl Britney--that stuff doesn't fit too well into my discussion here. But honestly, I think Shalit's idea is hilarious. I know my parents never really set arbitrary rules for me, and whatever consequences I incurred from assorted teenage missteps were real-world consequences, rather than the I-told-you-not-to-do-that-but-you-did-anyway-and-now-you're-grounded variety of punishment. My parents were not big on the "Because I said so/because I'm the parent and you are the hierarchically disadvantaged child" variety of discipline. Given, I got in trouble very rarely. I was not rebellious in any of the normal ways and so, I was probably difficult to punish. Seeing as I spent virtually EVERY weekend of my adolescence alone in my room reading, grounding me would hardly have carried the penal weight that it would have for most kids.

So what were they to do when I acted like a smartass? Well, more often than not, my mom would laugh and applaud my spunk. It's not like they were gonna force me to, I dunno, attend football games with hordes of other teenagers-- which would have been a truly miserable experience for me. But I do recall a conversation with my father (he denies recollection of this event), when I was about 15, in which he told me that, in this day and age, when there is so little social stigma against premarital sex, it was absolutely ridiculous for a person to wait until they've committed to a marriage before they discover whether or not they're sexually compatible with their partner of choice. The stereotypical protective-of-his-only-daughter dad, Fred is not-- in any way, shape, or form! In later years, his lack of protectiveness has led him to giving my phone number out to a stalker, but that's another story for another post. Suffice it to say, having a dad who so believes that his daughter is fully capable of taking care of herself is mostly really great-- and great for my self-esteem-- but every once in a while, it would be nice to have a firewall in place to guard against the crazies.

But were my parents permissive? I don't know. I didn't really get into enough trouble to test them. Was their permissiveness the reason that I've gone to some lengths to sexualize myself? In some ways, perhaps-- but only because they respected me and knew that, from a very young age, I have tended to make decisions based on what I actual want, as opposed to in opposition to arbitrary rules. And for the most part, I'm sculpted my sexual persona into the exact shape I find most suiting to me. Thank you, Mom and Fred, for granting me the freedom to make my own decisions! And for respecting the fact that I'm neither an idiot nor defenseless, such that I might need excessive sheltering.

Now, this is not to say that arbitrary rules don't piss me off. They do, but I'd rather deconstruct them and understand them than to haphazardly rebel against them. So, did my baby-boomer parents undermine my self-esteem by not issuing forth an edict that I was never, never, never allowed to have sex? Um. No. If you've met me, you can probably determine that this is far from the case. The fact that owning my sexuality is empowering for me pretty much shits all over Shalit's notion that being sexual equals being insecure.

And what a cockamamie idea it is! Shalit's real underlying assumption here-- the one I find so problematic-- is the one that insists women always use sex as a commodity, ripe for trading. In Shalit's world order, sex is what women give in exchange for diamonds, houses, cars, babies, security/stability (financial? emotional?), monogamy, external approbation (love of another), intimacy (in opposition to solitude), jobs, raises, cold hard cash. I mean, if women were to view sex as a satisfactory and appealing end unto itself, rather than trying to employ it in some misguided bartering system, why would being sexual make us feel bad about ourselves? If we give sex and expect any one or all of the things from my list above, and don't receive them, well, yeah, that feels lousy. If we give sex and expect, um, sex in return, well? Then we've made a pretty good deal, haven't we? In effect, Shalit is calling us all whores when she insists that casual sex leads to demoralization-- because, really, demoralization only arises when one party feels his/her end of the deal wasn't upheld, and that only happens when something expected was not granted. So, Shalit's "return to modesty" really means "own your inner prostitute." Uh, thanks, Wendy.

I'm also quite perturbed at Shalit's notion that sexual abstinence equates with goodness. This, of course, pisses me off because, here we are, right back at moralizing about sex. People who have sex are not bad. People who kill, steal, manipulate, lie, eat babies, poke their dogs in the eyes, drive Hummers, eat nothing but fast food, lie to the American public about the existence of nuclear devices are bad. Ah, crap. Even I can't say that with any conviction. People who do those things engage in immoral acts, in my opinion. I do not think they are correlatively bad people. But my point is, these are ACTUAL immoral acts. Fucking someone hurts no one, burns calories, hopefully ends in orgasms for both, and is fun. Where's the immorality there? Of course, I'm already granting the fact that this illustrative fuck is occurring without anyone expecting something more tangible than said orgasm in return. If one party promises something and reneges after the fuck, well, then, yes, a small morally questionable event has occurred. But the sex itself? Why is it that a sexually active girl with a bullet-proof sense of honesty and integrity still cannot be a good girl, by Shalit's definition? Because she presupposes that all women use sex as a commodity, that's why! And using sex as a commodity is, in my world order and in Shalit's, immoral. So. Now, I know this seems obvious but, um...girls, why don't we just stop using sex as a commodity? Hey, problem solved! No more moralizing about sex, right? Well, no...

Shalit, instead, opts for coining the term "Fourth-Wave Feminist" to denote she who is a prude-- um, I mean, she who "feels oppressed by how public sexuality is." Siegel cites, in a positive light, Shalit's congratulatory description of girls who organized a "girlcott" of some silly Abercrombie t-shirts. (The example given is one that reads "Who needs brains when you have these?") And I think this kinda willingness to get offended over something so goofy is, again, distinctly disempowering. I personally find shirts like that to be hysterically funny. If one so small-breasted and verbally bombastic as myself were to wear such a shirt, I would think that the ironic re-appropriation of the message would be worth its weight in feministic gold! The thin-skinned-ness of the sort of activism Shalit is applauding is so counter-productive and encourages girls to seek out ways in which the culture at large wants to victimize them and then camp out in that place. Beyond that, one of the really brilliant tactics Wikipedia credits third-wavers for instituting was that very re-appropriation of the language that had previously oppressed us. Has Shalit missed all the lessons of the post-modern era? Are we now so ensconced in the Post-Ironic Age that we can no longer see how there is power to be in had in turning dirty words on their heads and claiming them as our own?

Please tell me that, if we are indeed at the tail end of the third wave, there are still enough of us who are still in our child-bearing years that we may still produce enough daughters willing to embrace and defend the hard-fought sexual liberation that their, and our, mothers have tried to establish for us. Shalit wants to incite a whole new war-between-the-generations here, and I hope she doesn't. Solidarity between the generations will doubtlessly be more profitable. What good will it do if a bunch of little uptight, prudish brats turn their noses up at the work to which their earthy mothers have dedicated their lives?

And so, in a feeble attempt to keep the third-wave flag waving, I title this post with a crude cunnilingual reference and declare Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears to be among the most compelling cultural icons of our day. I'd hate to see Shalit and her coterie of young regressive thinkers made much headway towards tamping down the joyful, sexually satisfied sluts, bitches and hos of my generation.

And no, I still haven't read her damn book. Nor do I want to. It's a good thing I'm not a real journalist, eh?

Jousting Blonds: more defense of hot chicks

No sooner had I laid the foundations for my argument for solidarity with the hot young panty-flashers of the day, did I find this article that irritatingly posits everybody's favorite dead princess in opposition to Paris the Heiress. Now some of the stuff this article says, I can agree with (I'll get there shortly, don't worry), but a lot of it is just insane. I, for one, am sick of the comparison. They're both blond. They're both wealthy. They're both media-hounded celebrities. But Paris is the slut while Diana at least looked lady-like out the outside. And if I had my choice about with whom I'd rather have sex, I'd pick Paris every day of the week and 6 or 8 times on Tuesday (that's for you, H!). That shy, pouting-through-the-eyelashes thing just does nothing for me, Di. Sorry, Lady. Not that I hold any grudges against Diana, it's just that she's just another human-- albeit, one who was pretty good at manipulating the media such that she's been virtually canonized posthumously, but an ordinary human, nonetheless.

In any case, Chaudhry spends lot of time arguing that the the primary difference between Diana and today's crop of female celebrity flesh is that Diana played up her victimhood in her image (well beyond those pesky confines of reality) while P, B and L (like the sandwich, but thus far, none of us have been so lucky!) attempt to suppress theirs (which is sometimes quite real, indeed) in favor of presenting an image of independence and party-girlhood. Bullshit, I say! Here's a quotation from Chaudhry:
"In a June 17 column, Naomi Wolf complained about a culture that "seems increasingly obsessed with showcasing images of glamorous young women who are falling apart," citing the spectacle of Britney Spears's meltdown, Paris Hilton's arrest and Lindsay Lohan's various stints in rehab. The more women advance in the real world, Wolf argues, the more "the broken, out-of-control ingenue--who clearly can't manage without lots of help--is reassuring. And, I'd say, seductive." In other words, Paris may be no Marilyn or Diana, but she serves exactly the same purpose: to assure us of feminine vulnerability.

It would be a convincing argument, except these young women present themselves as neither broken nor fragile.Where Diana made much of her indifferent mother, Lindsay plays down her far more dysfunctional family life, which includes an ex-convict dad. Like Paris, these young women position themselves as overindulged princesses rather than scarred little waifs. Peddling emotional pain is just not their thing."
And, yes, perhaps they do covet that image of "overindulged princess," but what about that which appears to be a very real drug addiction (Please note: application of the spa version of rehab is NOT helpful) in the case of Lindsay Lohan in particular is so well-concealed that one might want to call this girl a self-sufficient new model of femininity? So Chaudhry concedes that Diana was probably far less "tragic" (a.k.a, fucked up) than the princess might have had us believe, but she never quite gets around to conceding that Lindsay is probably every bit as fucked up as she would have us believe. I really don't see a hell of a lot of effort, on the part of these girls, to hide much. (On a side note, I did read Naomi Wolf's article back in June. She, too, offers some interesting, but far from bullet-proof insights into this issue.) But, basically, as much as I'd love for the new iconic female image to be one that freely flouts social mores and unapologetically refuses to conform to anyone's notions of feminine vulnerability, I don't think our flashy girls are really as renegade and stolid as Chaudhry wants so badly to give them credit for being.

Chaudhry does, however, get quite a lot right in this article--her willingness to grant the fact that the image of the saintly Diana and the image of the debauched Paris are equally concocted figments of the public imagination, for example. As I intimated in my previous post, we don't have access in any real way to any of these women and therefore our interpretations of the images are ultimately pretty meaningless, based on so much hot air as they are. The idea that Diana played her audience, manipulating us with a contrived vulnerability and shyness-- well, I like the idea, of course, because it grants the woman a whole new sense of agency. But, in reality, I have no idea which of those iterations of the princess would be most accurate-- probably neither! And I'm nauseated by the "Candle in the Wind" Diana because she is created in the outdated image of what Chaudhry called "tragic love goddesses." Yawn. I'd rather watch a reckless and unapologetic party girl any day. At least she owns her life, even if she's not too great at taking responsibility for it (yet?).

Chaudhry goes on to make one other point that I think is dead on. Here's another excerpted paragraph:
There is, however, a price to pay for their transgressions. "I find of particular interest the amount of hatred people have, especially male commentators, for Paris Hilton," says Karen Hollinger, author of The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. "She isn't portrayed as looking for love--and finding or not finding it--but as beautiful and rather wild. On the other hand, Diana fit so well into the model of the beautiful woman searching and suffering for love that men were falling all over themselves to celebrate this 'candle in the wind.'"
Truer words regarding the Hilton/Princess deathmatch may never have been spoken. Among my female friends, sure, there are a handful who write poor Paris off as a "dumb blond slut" (an image that is such a transparent decoy for the purposes of attracting media-generated target-practice that I'm not quite sure why anyone actually buys it), but a number of us either don't care one way or other about her, or nurse little crushes on her. After all, that leather-onesy-clad burger commercial seems to have had an effect on many a female libido. From my male friends, however, I've never heard such vitriol regarding a woman who is scarcely more than an abstract concept in any of our lives. I should say, I do have one male friend who owns his crush on Ms. Hilton, but I can't imagine this particular friend EVER feeling threatened by bold-faced female pleasure-seeking. So, what gives, guys? Why do you hate her so? What is it about the particular zeitgeist into which this woman has tapped that makes you so uncomfortable? I don't mean these questions accusatorily, but rather, because I'm actually curious.

(There is one more forthcoming post on this topic and then I'll be be done with my flagellations of this dead horse for a while. Promise.)

In defense of hot chicks

It's no secret my job makes me crazy. Even if my supervisor hadn't recently enacted a de facto prohibition on taking advantage of the best benefit ever (paid time off), I would find my job demoralizing. Daily, I spend 9+ hours contributing to the bastard baby of the American educational system--testing. Teachers hate us for crippling their creative impulse within the classroom. Parents hate us because, sometimes, their kids wind up on the downside of that age-old parabola known as the bell curve. Kids hate us because we wield both the whips and the chains of the 9-month school year. And President Bush loves us because he thinks what we do actually measures something-- and that something is actually something possible to measure in the first place.

So, I'm beginning to entertain the idea of pursuing yet another degree-that-will-not-ever-ever-lead-to-gainful-employment. It's really such a shame that my motivations so rarely stem from the desire to support myself. I've got two books already half-written in my head-- one would require an anthropology doctorate and would result in a cookbook that might resemble the creative lovechild of culinary anthropologist/English professor Jessica B. Harris (author of my beloved Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim) and Al Gore in his documentarian incarnation. And the other? Well? I think I might have to invent my own inter-disciplinary field so that I can learn all the critical tricks of the trade so as to formally discuss softcore porn films and the joys of being a sexpotty-mouth (ahem, I meant third-wave feminist) in a scholarly fashion. Critical film studies? Gender studies? Sociology? Creative non-fiction? Regardless, neither of these books would grant me the cache it takes to procure a more satisfying J-O-B than my current one. I may, eventually, have to resort to teaching after all. Man, I hope my advisory committee doesn't make me give up swearing when I write my dissertation. Fuck, no! I won't do it!

Beyond my usual working-girl malaise, I've recently become bombarded with little tidbits of media that make me feel as though we sexpotty-mouths need some pretty serious defending in a greater social context. But firstly, I must delineate my argument. Last week, I found this article. And I found it kinda ridiculous. The idea that the American Pin-up is the poster girl of female empowerment and sexual liberation? Come on, now! She's an apple-cheeked farm girl or a bubble-headed Farrah Fawcett. She's cute and I don't mind looking at her, but Rosie the Riveter is certainly the exception to the rule in her pedigree. She's entirely sexualized and her sexuality is necessarily associated with selling stuff, rather than being for her own pleasure. While she may reflect assorted changing mores about female roles in our cultural landscape, really, what is she beyond the ultimate subject for that old hobgoblin-ish male gaze? Calling her "subversive" and "self-aware" is a stretch, for me, when all she's really doing is riding the fence between wholesomeness and titillation. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but what's representative of the forward motion of the female in that? I mean, looking for the sweet spot on that very fence has been the primary goal of every commercial image since the dawn of capitalism. I just find Buszek's argument to be so far-fetched!

She goes on to amorphously describe the "pin-up's legacy" on third-wave feminists. She says this: "Today, the subject of sexuality is being proposed as reason for and a way toward a thoughtful, plural feminist culture, and at least one generation of young feminists has come of age to internalize and apply this idea as a matter of course, rather than a point of violent debate." And I don't really have too much of a clue as to what that means. As she doesn't offer a working definition of "plural feminism, " the best I can estimate is that she's arguing that the modern-day pin-up represents, as do women of my generation and younger (who steadfastly and promisingly refuse to concede that the word "feminist" has been abused by the Limbaughs of the world to the point that it has come to be synonymous with that vomitious coinage "feminazi"), the idea that any one of many diverse notions of girl-power can lead one to the golden water trough of female empowerment. And this, my friends, is a load of crap. To be clear, I do agree that there are many paths that could potentially lead a girl to take control of her life. You could label any one or all of those paths "feminism," if you please. But this is not the legacy of the pin-up!

That actual legacy of this pin-up, well, we know them well, don't we? Let's just say her name starts with a "P", an "L" or a "B" and ends with an "aris", an "indsay" or a "ritney." These beautiful, decadent trainwreck girls are the product of several generations of the commodification of female sexuality. On one hand, they're brazen and unabashed about the splendor of their bodies (pre-baby-ruination, in poor Britney's case, anyway-- her little bloated face just breaks my heart!) But they seem ill-equipped in terms of real empowerment to deal with the fact, once you submit to the world's ravenous appetite for the pin-up, the world has a hard time shifting gears so as to allow the pin-up her humanity.

As we watch each of these girls fall deeper into her own abyss of drugs, jail time, and demoralization, I find my own sense of camaraderie with them expanding exponentially. I suppose that's a strange thing to say. And I don't mean to imply a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I sentiment here. But when I look at the real-world consequences of these girls' attempts to own (and, I guess I must concede, make a profit from) their sexiness, I'm wholly disheartened. In actuality, I don't have much of an opinion about how they choose to lead their lives. I think it's unfortunate that their every little folly becomes grist for petty misogynists and camera-happy raptors, but who am I to have any particularly strong conviction about the lifestyle choices of some perfect stranger? I'm no one, that's who.

Still, it rankles (a friend recently made fun of me for using this word in an email. People say "rankle," right?) me a little when I hear someone call Paris, Britney or Lindsay a "slut," for example. I've been called a "slut" plenty. Often, I've had the privilege of being present to defend myself (which these girls, being merely figuratively ubiquitous, usually do not). But even if I weren't, I'm pretty much okay with the moniker-- for one, it implies I'm getting a lot more ass than, in reality, I am, and for another, I find the "monogamy model" of relationships to be a VERY sketchy concept, and so, if sluttery is my only option, I guess I'll own it. But these pretty and famous girls? In the public discourse, they're equated with prostitutes, despite the fact that a very small number of us actually have access to knowledge of their sex-lives. How dare we judge them when we just don't, and can't, actually know anything truly substantive about them? Are we not, in fact, judging them for their public images? The very same images for which we begged them? And paid them?

Does the selling of a pretty picture, alone, now constitute whoring oneself? Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say that it does. If we're paying for that picture, thus providing the demand for the supply (see, Joe, I understand the laws of supply-and-demand just fine!), how're we not implicating ourselves in a warped system that worships and then ravages pretty, young starlets? And how is our purchase of the wares of these so-called "sluts" not all the more repugnant?

And now, let's throw into this particular nausea-inducing little economy the fact that the selling of those images comes at great personal cost to these girls. Yes, they've got all the money in the world--and, one could argue, enough cultural capital to constitute "power"-- but Lindsay Lohan was, what? nine years old? when she started making movies? Now, I think, of the three I've called by name in this post, I think she's both the most talented and the downright sexiest, but there's no doubt this poor child was never given an opportunity to acquire the skills necessary to manage her life, not to mention her effulgent sexuality (some girls just can't help it-- they're born with that with which they are born!). And Britney? You can't seriously tell me you didn't think those big brown eyes were cute as buttons when she was 15. Can we take a moment to mourn the fall of one of greatest fin de siecle sexpots? Are the effects of mundane human weakness and the effects of being eaten alive by the media monster, combined, not wholly tragic? And Paris. Once a girl who was guilty of no more than having celluloid evidence that she enjoys being penetrated (and, well, not having need for gainful employment) is now a blubbering, tearful ex-con. Personally, of the three, I think Paris is most likely to right herself and live out a long, well-photographed, skinny, blond life. But I suppose it's equally plausible that she, too, will slide down rabbit hole of celebrity. And wouldn't we miss her if she did?

So, I guess the real moral of the pin-up's story is that, if you are sexy and refuse to apologize for it, and perhaps even attempt to profit from it, the world will idolize you and then the world will get sick of you and then the world will deride you and eventually, the world will cannibalize you. Gee, that just makes me feel right cheerful! And subversive! And full of third-wave pride! Gimme a break, Ms. Buszek.