Modern feminism - women ordering other women how to behave, instead of men ordering women how to behave.
Via Hot Air, this article on Red-State Feminism describes post-feminism – essentially the rejection of the “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” camp. Times have changed since my great-aunt – a single woman – went to the bank to try to get a mortgage and was told that even though she was gainfully employed with a reliable work history, she’d need her father or some other male in her family to co-sign. And now that they have changed – thankyouverymuch, bra-burning radicals – we’re sorry to hurt your feelings, we appreciate what you did, but we don’t share your goals or desires and we often have a different perspective on the outcomes of what you fought for. Most young women have no idea who Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem are and don’t care. What we do know today is that along with all that sexual freedom comes STDs that can kill us, and that the biggest indicator of child poverty is single parenthood. As Ace inimitably puts it,
But as many wags have said, post-pill, post-Roe — the Sexual Revolution was won, all right, and won conclusively, but by men. Women’s sexual autonomy increased, of course, but so did men’s; and if women were more freed from the consequences of sex, men were freed even more. How could it be otherwise? How could women’s sexual freedoms not move in tandem with men’s?
But Marcotte and the rest of the gynocranks seem to want to spin this as some great victory for women. Well, fine. So long as you keep giving up the nookie, you can call it whatever you like.
My daughter cannot conceive of a world where she’d be refused a loan – or a job – based on her sex. Does discrimination still happen? Of course; but it’s not the pervasive issue it was forty years ago. Things really have changed. Times really are better. So the old-school feminists and their ever-shrinking group of followers are reduced to shrill cries like “but, but, men get paid more!” followed by sullen silence when the wage gap myth is debunked. They’re as angry as ever, but now in addition to The Patriarchy(tm) they fear and resent those of us who aren’t picking up their torch and carrying it.
It reminds me of this quote from My Big Fat Greek Wedding where Maria Portokalos tells her daughter, who is rejecting tradition by marrying a non-Greek -
Listen to me. My village saw many wars. Turkish, German… they all made a mess. And my mother, she said: “We’re lucky to be alive.” And I thought, “We’re not lucky to be alive. “We’re not lucky, when they are telling us where we should live, what we should eat. Nobody has that right. And then, I see you. And I see Athena and Niko. We came here for you. so you could live. I gave you life, so that you could live it.
Yesteryear’s feminists are not so gracious. It’s clear that the idea wasn’t to give my generation (I’m 40) freedom and choice. We are instead expected to toe the line and further the goals of the previous generation. Failure to do so is the one intolerable offense. The Anchoress writes,
So “sisterhood” is baloney, and dramatic accusations of chauvinism are fake projections. And all the outcry about the sexist attitudes of terrible, aggressive men who we have heard for decades “just don’t get it?” No matter how genuine the problem may have been, these women have now displayed such merciless sexism toward another woman – for the unforgivable crime of thinking differently than they do – that they have severely undercut their own credibility.
But since I’m dredging up movie quotes, I think Sidney Poitier’s response to his father in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner is especially apropos:
You listen to me. You say you don’t want to tell me how to live my life. So what do you think you’ve been doing? You tell me what rights I’ve got or haven’t got, and what I owe to you for what you’ve done for me. Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing! If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you’re supposed to do! Because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another. But you don’t own me! You can’t tell me when or where I’m out of line, or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don’t even know what I am, Dad, you don’t know who I am. You don’t know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it’s got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand, you’ve got to get off my back! Dad… Dad, you’re my father. I’m your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.
It’s our turn now, and our daughters’. If we find Sarah Palin’s choices more admirable than the ones advocated by Steinem and Friedan, at least they can take comfort in the fact that their leadership made Palin’s choices possible. They followed in the footsteps of suffragettes who endured far more than they did and would would likely disapprove vehemently of what the 60s radicals did with the freedoms they provided. That’s the way it goes. To you old-school, campus-leftist feminists: we regret that you don’t like the choices we make, but if you won’t respect the fact that it’s our right to make them, you reveal yourselves not as the vanquishers of the fearsome Patriarchy, but their replacements. Is that really what you wanted?
