Hugo Schwyzer again, on a major issue separating different generations or waves of feminism.

...I’ve just finished Astrid Henry’s Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (I learned about the Henry book from Courtney Martin at Feminsting.) The book explores the “mother-daughter” model to describe the conflict between two successive waves of feminism: the Second Wave of the 1960s and early ’70s and the Third Wave that began to emerge in the early 1990s. Feminists of the Second Wave (everyone from Betty Friedan to Shulamith Firestone) were born between 1920-1955; the Third Wave roughly corresponds to “Generation X” (1964-1981). Some folks, of course, now speak of a Fourth Wave. To outsiders, it all gets very confusing. Though imperfect, the Wikipedia definitions of Second and Third Wave feminism are helpful.
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Henry’s point is fairly straightforward: beginning in the early 1990s with writers as different as Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfield, and Naomi Wolf, feminists of “my” generation (born in the 1960s and early ’70s) began to publish a series of critical attacks on their “mother’s” feminism. This generation — my generation — shared the Second Wave commitment to women’s equality, but were eager to rebel against what they saw as certain feminist orthodoxies. Where an earlier generation of feminists embraced collective action, this new generation — or so it is often argued — favored the pursuit of individual happiness. Where an earlier generation of feminists was mistrustful of open displays of sexuality, worrying about the ways in which a sexualized culture exploited women, the Third Wavers embraced women’s sexual agency, talking frankly about desire and pleasure in ways that made their mothers uncomfortable.

Read the excerpts in context here.

I’m old enough to remember the generational transition pretty distinctly. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the break Henry mentions happens right about the time Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s work on consent, the “stop rape by any means necessary” activism by, especially, separatists, and the spread of the first “no means no” campaigns. One thing I’ve noticed over, and over, and over, is that *if you can’t remember * when, say, World War II ended and “the boys” came home, or Kennedy was shot, or they landed on the moon, or when no didn’t mean no then it’s almost impossible to sympathize with those who do. And, furthermore, if you do remember those things it’s inconceivable that everyone wouldn’t defer to your totally-well-earned on-the-battlefield wisdom and experience.

Looking from the outside, anyway, the success of no means no among younger women changed everything about women’s experience of sexual dynamics. A fairly ruthless way of putting it would be that 2nd-wave feminists saw sexual choice still as exerting control over who to say “yes” to, and it was a fairly short list. 3rd-wave women, thanks entirely to the sacrifices of their 2nd-wave colleagues (intergenerational, yes, but generally all still alive.) Having the luxury of recognizing that no means no (and that it’s a problem when it’s not) they had the luxury of contemplating not just who to say yes to but what as well.

The problem I’m wrestling with, and in some ways it’s the biggest problem of all, is that on the whole men aren’t getting any of this. Women are exercising sexual agency in greater degrees and men, by and large, are reacting with “huh, huh, she said blow job” style adolescent disbelief.

And with that (intolerable to me) situation, bingo: both generations are miraculously correct: 3rd-wavers are right to the extent women are employing sexual agency for their own enjoyment; 2nd-wavers to the extent men just see it all as perhaps a smarter version of “girls gone wild” or maybe even just “some girls are easy.”

To the extent the two “generations” (really schools of thought) keep their conflict between each other instead of with you, me, us men in general, then it’ll be even harder for you, me, and other men on paths following, paralleling, and supporting feminism to continue moving our gender out of the old 20th Century and into the new. Which is sort of a big deal because as men we’ll not only be happier we’ll be healthier, longer lived, more financially stable, more sexually satisfied, and more respected.