Titanium Clad Snot Twaddle

'I'm not a feminist but...'

I heard this titanium clad inanity, (you know -- back when I had hearing), all too often back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was spouted by female friends who were  objecting to pay inequality and/or being turned away from jobs solely due to their lady bits.

They’d apparently fallen hard for the backlash bullshit spewed by Rush Limbaugh and the frat boys who couldn’t get it up without a full head of I’m-so-superior-and-you’re-JUST-a-girl going on. You know -- they were all: 'feminists are fat, angry, hairy man haters who can't get a date.’

And so many sad damsels bought the brainwashing. There’s even a Facebook page entitled Ladies Against Feminism!

Feminist:
adjective
1.
advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men.
noun
2.
an advocate of such rights.

from dictionary.com -- not exactly a hotbed of radicalism. Smacks more of 'gee, duh, YEAH' than extremist man hating, eh?

Feminist -- Mary Ann Maderer

Feminists -- Caroline de Marinis and Lucia Fanelli

With Nora Ephron’s essays on the women’s movement during the ‘60s and ‘70s in mind, I’ve been having conversations about women-in-the-workplace fun with my good friend ‘Penelope.’ She’s a little bit older than me but younger than Nora would have been had she stuck around on this good green earth.

Penelope's response to all this 'I'm not a feminist but...' plaxicoing:

Crazy, isn't it? I don't see how any thinking woman OR man, for that matter, could NOT be feminist. I've never been a militant personality, and I think many people think if you're not militant, you're not a feminist.

Maybe it's just because I'm old and crotchety, but it seems to me that this generation of women has lost the sense of righteous indignation that we had in the 1960s and 70s about these issues. Now that I'm "back in the 60s" (ie., OLD) I find myself becoming angry about the lack of collaboration that women have regarding equality in the workplace. We used to be noisier about this stuff. Instead, it seems like an entire generation of women have reverted to wanting to look like sex kittens, snag the eyes of the men and just flounder through life trying to look like Barbie dolls.

Tell it Penelope!

This past Thursday while poking around in Brookline Booksmith I came upon Caitlin Moran’s book How To Be A Woman. At first look I thought ‘Oh joy. More disgusting, anti-woman propaganda by some pathetic Phyllis Schlafly-esque (equal rights for me but not for thee) type.’ Then I picked it up and started reading.

“Do you have a vagina?” she writes. “Do you want to be in charge of it?” If you said yes to both, “Congratulations! You’re a feminist.”

“What do you think feminism is, ladies? What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? ‘Vogue,’ by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit get on your nerves? OR were you just drunk at the time of survey?”

Yup, I’m in love. And I bought the book.

 A parting short from our Nora:

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim." 

Nora Ephron in a 1996 speech to the graduating class of Wellesley College, her alma mater.