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.
...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.
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.
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-11-13 23:55.
Well, "no means no" thinking, taken to extremes, can often come off as another aspect of the "no-sex-class" thing--when women gain the power to say no, maybe they'll start saying it all the time!
(I remember a lot of terribly well-meaning sex ed classes that taught the girls "ways to say no to a boy" and gave absolutely no thought to the possiblity that we might want to say yes.)
I don't think most men want to rape, but if you're given an apparent choice between rape or chastity... it's pretty easy to say screw the whole game. And if you don't accept consent as the foundation of women's sexual agency, then feminists with aggressive sexuality seem to just be coming out of nowhere with it.
Guess they must just be sluts, huh?
[Oh yeah, Holly. I think one of the first big no-sex class lightbulbs went off when I read a blog commenter complain, bitterly, about how "no means no" is incomplete because it opens up no space for women to ask men for dates or sex. Thinking about that made me realize just what a trap society creates for women where *even for progressives* the entire indoctrination was a) for women to say no and b) for men to respect it when they're told no. The implication, which is dreadful in its heaviness, is that once you say yes he'll take it from there since yes is your *only* responsibility in sex. (That plus if at any point you "come to your senses" and back out he's supposed to respect that too. Which he should, of course, but *again* it assumes it's *all his initiative* and therefore *his to halt!*) Anyway, yeah, while no *really does* have to mean no, the alternative isn't just heterosexual women being able to say "yes" but to also say "you busy Saturday night?" Cool cool point. Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-11-13 23:55.
[Comment removed, reluctantly, at FP/HT's request. --fl][For what it's worth, FP, I think you'll find that 3rd-wave feminists -- real ones and not the fluffy self-styles "post-feminists" or "opt-out feminists" -- are just as sick of the facts you highlight and the men (and some women) who work to make them real as you are. As sick as I am. As just plain tired of the unnecessary of pretending that living in virtual emotional hypothermia is somehow better. As for 2nd-wave classics, if you're willing to recognize that their work put the world in motion such that sometimes parts of their work seem obsolete, then there are some great ones out there -- Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Stephanie Coontz, Andrea Dworkin, and (appropriate so near the death of the big zero Norman Mailer) Kate Millet. Just for a start. I've been reading them and getting an awful lot out of them. Maybe it's because I remember when their works described the world all to exactly, but I think you could get a lot out of them too. One big thing? You read those writers and wonder just what the fuck everybody was so scared about that they'd resist what makes so much sense and threatens so little that really matters about humanity, of women, of men instead of these pretenses of "femininity" and "masculinity" that seem to be mostly made up. Thanks. --fl] -->
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-14 00:11.
Oh man, you are so right (with your response to my last comment), Figleaf. A woman's choices shouldn't be "no" or "yes." They should be "no" or "take off your shirt..."
[Exactly! Same for men -- we need to learn to say the same thing when *our* partners begin to proposition us. Thanks, Holly. --fl]
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-14 02:35.
My mildly tangential thoughts: It's true that the world has changed and things are a lot different for me than they would have been for my mother. There are likely also cultural differences by region/country too. Between the two it means that there are a bunch of feminist novels which I can't get into -- if they're science-fiction ones (eg Handmaid's Tale, Native Tongue) I can't believe such a world could come into being in our future, and for all of them I can't find any sympathy for the women I see as alternatively wimpy and foolishly rash. It's not a fault in the books themselves, just that they don't translate at all to the culture I grew up in. Which doesn't mean I don't see serious problems remaining, just that they're different problems.
[We live in a pretty pragmatic world, which by and large I really appreciate. Having studied the history and philosophy of science in college, though, I'm also aware that a lot of early enlightenment science was undertaken at least in part out of a search for new poetic metaphors. I also know that while people *on average* have way more respect for science, most individuals take it on faith and rely, instead, on the... metaphors science creates. (For instance most people don't have a technical "hypothesis" they have a hunch or something they're curious about.) Anyway, the long point of this ramble is that literature, while more subtle than, say, vaccines, can be just as effective at changing culture. The presence of books like The Handmaid's Tale can serve sort of as cultural innoculations such that, *if they're effective* they sometimes seem irrelevant. Dworkin's a great example of that by the way -- there are still problems in the world that her work can address perfectly adequately but for millions she changed the dialogue such that she sounds alarmist now. The trick, however, isn't to get everybody to go back to the first floor and see the world as it was when she was writing, it's to start up the next flight of stairs and address problems that arise on this new level. Thanks, Zeborah. --fl]
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-14 08:01.
I had something relatively insightful to say, but then I saw your photo.... Just proof that women can be easily visually distracted, I guess.
[Weird to think proof would be needed. I mean, yeah, that's whole point of the "no-sex" class paradim is to make us believe otherwise but even so. Thank you, Kitty. --fl]
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-14 09:06.
One of the things that occasionally frustrates me about conversations in feminist organizations is the sense that some of the people there think no progress has been made. This especially frustrated me as a young woman, because I had a strong sense of how much better my choices were than my mothers. Of course one needs to keep fighting, but the "keep on fighting" "motivational" talk in the early 90s feminist organizations I had contact with was roughly of the form "look how terrible everything is still even though we've been working forever". Which I found demotivational, at least with respect to these groups. I am motivated by past successes, not past failures.
So one of the things I really respond to in this post is the progress it highlights. Yes rape is still a problem. Call me a pessimist, but I doubt it will ever cease to be a problem, anymore than murder is going to cease to be a problem any time soon. But the campaigns have changed something I think is more important: how women think about their sexuality and their rights to their own bodies. If we could change how men think about women's sexuality and how both men and women think about men's sexuality that would be another huge step forward.
Oh, and teaching women that men are always ready is a terrible thing. I figured out that I could say "take off your shirt" early on, probably due to my hippy pro-sex parents. I was traumatized at 15 when a young man said no, really thinking there must be something wrong with me, since men always want sex, right?
[It's been several months and I still keep meaning to write about this "still more to do" attitude. I agree 100% that there's been astonishing progress since I became an adult. I have to say also, however, that there's this weird paradox that it seems to take the same amount of effort to close half the remaining gap so that instead of increasing momentum there tends to be increasing resistance to the last increments of change. The answer for me is that we have to start recruiting us/me/men. Goodness knows there's something in it for us to get on board with you, and *everyone* can benefit from the resulting collaboration. Y'know that old saying "the military is always preparing to fight the last war" that one pundit or another are always bringing up? Well, same with feminist activism. The women who sometimes literally put their lives on the line to take back the night on college campuses can't, and shouldn't forget what drove them to it, what sometimes-violent reactions they had to deal with, and the sometimes too-good-to-be-true wariness about progress they were making. *But!* Just as we *have* to respect them they also have to respect the world they've created and trust/encourage/support both the battles *and the freedoms* their own battles made possible. Part of what's so frustrating about the whole wave disagreements is that it sidetracks so much real momentum. Thanks, E. --fl]
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-14 12:44.
Thing is, fl, I lived through the "sexual harassment/rape awareness" training and all the facultative lesbianism at a major West Coast university in the early 90s, and what it produced was a two-tiered system of sorority chicks who were only interested in traditionally-masculine men, and radfem lesbians who were only interested in women. Nice Guys(tm or otherwise) were SOL in a system that really meant "'Just Say No' Means NO." It wasn't anti-rape so much as anti-normal male heterosexuality, and the only way around it was to fulfill the traditional male sex role as written by patriarchy...take the lead, flirt, touch, escalate, time after time, with 50, 100, 1000 "nos" to each yes. (I was constantly trying to connect with women, and trying too hard as a low-dominance male, and I think if you shrug off feminism's contribution to the situation, you're coming too much from the perspective of the "natural alpha" and projecting too much onto the rest of us.) I mean, not everybody can wind up as gloriously messed-up as I am, where I basically tell women (I am 34) that I'm still making up for lost time and not interested in an exclusive relationship. I tend to regard the SC as a pendulum-swing BACK from a system where women were expected to DENY MEN SEX (because the only proper sex can be had ony with other WOMEN) and in general I'm willing to defend it, though not its worst excesses. HughRistik blogged quite a bit about institutionalized feminism's role in quashing male heterosexuality in the university setting both at Amptoons and Feminist Critics, and as he's British I imagine he described an even more insular and self-reinforcing ethos than in the American academy. A LOT of it has to do with shaming men for sexual desire, or for belittling men who don't get sex in a way that women with few-to-no sexual relationships are never belittled, and I think the opportunity to get someone both coming and going is one of the reason beating up on Nice Guys(tm) is so much fun for the blogosphere at large.
[I'm probably going to surprise you by agreeing whole-heartedly, Eurosabra. The early 1990s were bad. The mid-to-late 1980s were worse. And, while there were fewer places to encounter them, trying to be heterosexually male around emergent feminists in the 1970s was fraught with peril. Because they were making stuff up as they went along too, and (note the "generational" battles business) obviously getting some things wrong. If it's not always forgivable (there were some separatist-driven daycare incidents at my college where very young boys were "taught lessons" to make up for, effectively, the sins of their forefathers) it's understandable both from a fleeing-patriarchy-as-if-it-were-a-burning-building mentality and from a process standpoint where *nothing* new works 100% optimally the first time. Thing is, though, that just as I'm *still* walking on eggshells dating back to Holly Near's debut albums, the eggshells you're worried about are pushing two decades old as well. Yes, our formative years really do, well, *form* us, but that generational thing works both ways too. Point being that there are more women in the world today than the sorority members and separatists you, and I, remember from our respective college days. (For that matter there were then but we *really* didn't see them!) And just as *they* shouldn't be fighting their old battles, neither should we. --fl]
Submitted by 1747 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-14 13:39.
Interesting to learn I can't actually be a feminist since apparently none were born between 1956 and 1963!
In theory, it might have been liberating to have no particular allegiance to either wave - *except* I came of age in exactly the years that still have you walking on eggshells, dear figleaf. And as it turns out, that was a plenty fraught time for a young woman, too.
I still remember going to hear Catharine Mackinnon while I was in college, circa 1985, and getting furious about the abuse of women but not quite being convinced that getting in bed with Ed Meese was going to help anything. I also recall struggling to make sense of all the talk about how feminists were *supposed* to be "women-centered women," while I spent half my time either pursuing, daydreaming about, or (on a really good day) actually partaking of mad, wild heterosexual sex, preferably of the penetrative sort that was again *supposed* to be most suspect.
Now I'm not much concerned with "supposed to's" anymore, but it sure was confusing when I was a young woman.
Also my boyfriend at the time was torn between thinking it was hot that I was taking a self-defense course (student taught by members of a women's-only collective) and wondering if his manly parts were in mortal danger. (They never were, of course.)
As for men - yeah, the potential gains for them seem enormous to me, too. So the question becomes: What ostensible privileges and perks are men most afraid of losing?
[First of all if my post at all implies your demographic was missed it's probably my transcription error and not Shcwyzer or Henry's. Secondly, I'm still in touch with many of my friends from the 70's and 80's and you're right that it wasn't any easier for them, *especially* since they, and we men, weren't just struggling over what to do but also struggling over the basic concept that women could act directly instead of simply judging the merits or demerits of men's actions. That struggle just can't, can't, can't be underestimated *or* overappreciated. Plus yeah, there was that whole "you should want to..." thing we were *all* struggling with back then. That hurt worse than *any* feared-but-rarely-received pummlings at the hands of women who could (imagine the cheek!) defend yourselves. Yeah, it was cool but also yeah, it did make us feel like targets sometimes too. And as for what we as men can get out of feminism... *could have been getting for 40 years!?!?* Sometimes I swear it all boils down to defending a privilege to scratch our butts or balls and... really... the only reason we think we can't or shouldn't or don't do that is tied in to the notion that we're privileged in the first place. Very frustrating. Thanks, Sungold! --fl]