never trust an article that begins with...

..."Back in the 70s,"

So I picked up a copy of the latest issue of THIS magazine yesterday. I admit it, I'm a sucker for a catchy, troublesome cover blaring the topic of my dissertation in bright red and white letters that'll get me all riled up. This one features Barbie™ as its cover girl: a tight close-up of the painted glint in her otherwise vacuous cornflower blue eyes, überthin brow, and plastic-y smooth white skin. The accompanying text hollers: "Feminism for sale: the real reason the women's movement is losing momentum."

oooooh. yeah. I'll happily shell out my $4.95 for that, anyday.

This morning, with a cup of tea, I flipped through to the meat. I'm yelled at again by the cover text - this time atop a full-page black & white photo of a headless bunny (of the mudflap variety, not Cadbury™) as well as the names of the item's authors: Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Yes, there was a moment of shock as that registered. But I got over it. I read. "Back in the 70s,"...as the two take me back to 1972 (incidentally, the year I was born), when Marlo Thomas' record "Free to Be You and Me" was released, when there was a spike in the overall effectiveness of feminism in the mainstream, when people took notice, when the women's movement got shit done and meant something.

Then, of course, 3rd paragraph in, on to the 20-something bashing, generation dividing, righteous foremothers versus ungrateful daughters they go:

One area where this shows up is in the unbending refusal by many undergraduate women to identify as feminists (a tendency that drives many of their professors to distraction). These 20-somethings enjoy the benefits that were won in the hard-fought battles between the sexes, but won't concede that the war needed to be fought in the first place. so despite the easy self-confidence with which these women are taking over universities and preparing to dominate the job market in the coming decades, the old guard feels the war isn't over. The patriarchy remains fully in control, its apparent demise only making it that much more powerful. The fact that the "feminist" label is out of fashion reveals not just ignorance of past oppression, but widespread false consciousness. The true betrayal isn't of the past, but of the future (21).

OK, and there I toss the magazine down, put the kettle on, and contemplate leaving it to collect cat hair until I have to include yet another addition to an already overloaded review of the popular literature in Chapter 1. So much of the same old, same old.

But I returned, another cup of tea in hand, and read on. Instead of ranting on about the apolitical nature of young women these days (as expected) they suggest that there's something about feminism that makes it too problematic to wear the label. They ask, "what is this extra baggage that feminism has acquired?" (What isn't said is the 'since the movement was good' caveat, but I read it there anyway). Then, their central premise: the defects of countercultural thinking have been imported into the movement, and the concept of "patriarchy" has "dominated feminist thinking since the '60s" becoming "a gendered redescription of what countercultural theorists called the 'technocracy.'" OK. Interesting. Totally not where I expected them to go. They got me. I settle in and read further.

On to the breakdown. "Feminists," they argue, "far from being immune to this countercultural tendency, have basically bought the critique of mass society hook, line and sinker" (22). And here's where my back goes up again: a full page and a quarter on Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth and her politics of individualism based not on "sexism" but on "fighting for her right to party" (23). Remove the generational lens, and the argument so far is not that different than Williamsons (see below). I'm still with them, cringing not at their argument, but at the route they seem to be taking to get there.

Then they're off to Shulamith Firestone's (1969) The Dialectic of Sex, Susan Brownmiller's (1975) Against Our Will, Adrienne Rich's notion of "compulsory heterosexuality," the 1978 establishment of Women Against Pornography by Dworkin and MacKinnon, the mainstreaming of pornography (Deep Throat as example), then on to Wolf's second book Fire With Fire, a critique of power feminism as "lifestyle politics," a link to post-feminism and Camille Paglia and BOOM, we're back to hammering at the lousy politics of a 'younger generation' and a conflation of that with "the so-called third wave of radical feminism" (27). Interestingly - and outdatedly - the author's use Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake's (1997) Third Wave Agenda (then BITCH and BUST magazines) to talk around the "emerging third wave of feminism that sees itself as neither opposed to nor incompatible with the radical feminists of the second wave" (27). The piece devolves into its conclusion - with no real evidence of their original "counterculture" theory in site - that Courtney Love has become the feminist icon of contradiction (after, of course, listing the ways in which she also fits the bill as bad mother, plastic surgery dupe, and addict). Their sign-off is a total one-off: "Courtney Love as a feminist icon? Sure, why not. Free to be you and me."

Is it just me, or did I just spend an hour reading an article in a Canadian alternaleft magazine with the tagline "because everything is political" that solely examined American texts from the American pop culture mainstream bookshelves? Did I just read, in May of 2005, that Third Wave Agenda is the "evidence" of an "emerging" vein in feminist discourse? Did I really waste my time reading another article that assumes that a bestseller in the US is totally relevant and applicable to the Canadian context? That Brownmiller is more applicable to us than, say, Judy Rebick?

Granted, as shallow and superficial as their 'historical' trajectory is, there's nothing really there for me to get too pissed about that I haven't already ranted and raged on about before. They've just rewrote the same narrative that every newspaper (and a few glossy mags) in North America has reported since the mid to late 1990s. That it came out at this particular moment in time is just throw-your-hands-up irritating.

What's worth mentioning is that Heath and Potter are the co-authors of a book called The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed, an excerpt of which appeared in THIS a while back. An article worth a read, and a book that I think I'll pick up.

What's also begging the question, to me anyway, is why they didn't take any risks - the opportunity to speak about something useful instead of regurgitating the same old same old same old thing over again. Maybe it's because they haven't read any feminist work since 1997. Or maybe it's because it's just easier to fall into the generational paradigm. Or maybe it's because their nostalgia for a time long past overshadowed their critique. Or maybe it's because they're white boys, and can only see the movement as consisting of popular - or loud or unruly - white girls. Why not critique their own disattachment with feminism? With the link between feminism and masculinity? Hell, why not move forward with an interesting connection between counterculture "defects" and feminist ones?

Instead, they wasted 8 pages of magazine type for simple sensationalism masked with a call for direct political action. And that certainly isn't going to help 'political movement' or 'revolution' or even 'resistence' of any kind.