Feminism Is Dead. Long Live Feminism
The further we get from the heady days of draft-card and bra burning 1960s, the more the feminist movement fizzles out of our collective consciousness. As a set piece of media driven pop culture, feminism served some individuals well but society poorly. Not only was feminism one of the first social-engineering projects that bedevils America today, but it also lowered American wages and demeaned our sense of work.
Social Engineering
The Equal Rights Amendment was the rallying standard of the feminist movement. It failed to be ratified for a variety of reasons: The law did not create any new benefits for women; the law might have unintended consequences for women such as being subject to the draft and losing alimony/custody rights; and the law was not favored by labor unions or by the advocates of big labor. Since the 1980s, The ERA has become the handmaiden for the Pro-Choice or states-rights issues. The ERA continues to be re-introduced in Congress, but Terrorism, global warming, the economy and America’s sliding reputation in the world makes its passage less likely.
I raise the ERA not to pass judgment of the probity of the amendment, but to try and define what a feminist is. A feminist cannot be defined by his/her opposite because there is no male equivalent unless it is something that rhymes with sex-as-twigs. I also know that in the socio-babble of our group has a big tent, not all feminist are in favor of the ERA. Some like Eleanor Roosevelt who would stand up at the gates of Hell to protect the rights of women, were against the ERA. Some still are, but the semantics of the word remains vague.
What I am suggesting is that the ERA did not pass, and therein is the problem. Feminism was argued in the court of public opinion and in the media. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a piece of social engineering that prohibited discrimination in hiring on the basis of race or sex. But Women and minorities did not represent the same class of injustice. We could look at employment numbers and see (in part) how well or poorly we were doing in terms of racial fairness in hiring. And if the only way we could rock the system was to have quotas and affirmative action, so be it. But what do you do with women who represent a majority of the population?
The fires of female indignation were lit over the failure of the ER, and blazed over three decades of American history. In American culture women were portrayed as being – in every way – superior to men. “Ginger Rogers could dance as well as Fred Astaire, but she did it backwards while wearing high heels,” became the wide brush Feminist painted all arguments with. Society was redressing a wrong and things got crazy. Girls could play on boys’ college football teams that earned millions of dollars for the school, but boys could not play on girls’ volleyball teams that earned nothing. All other things being equal, women were often hired over men because the HR manager had a vague feeling this is what the politicians wanted. It was Politically Correct – and the new age of PC was born.
The politically correct flock swept down on academia like a scene from the Birds. In The New Sovereignty: Grievance groups have become a nation unto themselves (Harpers 1992) Shelby Steele wrote about the unintended consequence of the Civil Rights movement. Black studies and women’s studies were replacing a big chunk of the traditional curriculum at the college level. At the grammar school level, teachers who had bought into the feminist rhetoric were telling first grade girls that if they wanted to grow up to play linebacker for the Chicago Bears they could. From Frederick Douglas on we knew there was a difference in the struggle for fairness for minorities and fairness for women, but the feminist told us otherwise.
Looking back over the past forty years, it seems to me that the unintended, overall consequence of the feminist movement is that men in the US became suspect simply because of their sex. Much like Archimedes the feminist displaced, not water, but men. Men who built America came back from Vietnam to something less than ticker-tape parades . . . and the sneers only got louder over the passing years.
Luckily the fires of feminism are now dying down. When I say the Feminist movement was at best a wash, a female friend says “there are problems, but the movement was much better than a wash . . . .” I just go blank. I don’t know what to say.
Wages
Take two sets of photographs at home and at work. Take one set around 1910 and one set just before the recent economic crisis. In the 1910 set, women, including unmarried daughters, are at home, and men are in the fields or at work in factories and shops. In the 2007 picture both men and women, including wives and unmarried daughters, are at work and no one is at home - unless it is latch key kids watching TV for eight hours a day. I am not suggesting that women shouldn’t be allowed to work outside of the home. I am suggesting that there is a social cost for having your cake and eating it too.
Women began entering the workforce in significant numbers after WWII. Working women, whether they had just found a job or had been working for years, became de facto feminists. To be a woman and work outside the home was to become part of a historical struggle for female liberation. Books like the Feminist Mystique added fuel to the fire and called for redress. Women were told they could have it all. You go girl! The adage if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t, never darkened the door step of feminist thinking. Never.
The laws of supply and demand kicked in and with the surge of female job applicants wages paid went down – for men and women. A two income family became a necessity to survive, not as the feminist said, a chance for female fulfillment. Feminist began arguing for equal pay for equal work. There were certainly cases of this, but when these issues thinned out, the feminist turned their ire to the glass ceiling. The feminist began arguing that women needed fair access to the CEO classes - classes that had obscene salaries, perks and occasionally ended their notorious careers in a perp walks. With this, feminism cast adrift its constituency and lost its high ground.
In truth the feminist movement has always been bifurcated. In the top part were well educated women like Betty Friedan who articulated and sometimes screamed for redress and liberation. The much larger, lower part was made up of women working out of necessity and simply trying to make ends meet. The two parts never intersected in reality but often did in fiction and movies. Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich were successful movies not because the heroines did the right thing, but because they were women. Their foils, the bad guys who mistook the resolve and power of women, were men.
Men became dispirited. New terms came into the language like dead-beat dads and stuck to every man like napalm. There was no term for a man who kept up his financial commitments to his family even if the courts had taken his family away. Just as the word feminism has no opposite, there were no dead-beat moms.
Unfortunately, what we’ve lost in real wages we will never get back. Among other things, there is no feminist movement in the sweat-shop countries of the world.
The Demeaning of Work
We use to watch TV to escape from work. From Ozzie Nelson (Ozzie and Harriet 1952-1963) on what fictional characters do for work has been largely unknown and always unseen by the audience. The exhaustion, frustration, boredom, and fear of losing a job were left off-stage in favor of melodrama and the heightened emotion, not the heightened reality. Slowly, a world without work trumped reality and in the late 60s that melodramatic world began oozing into talk shows and even supposedly hard news programming while Willy Loman and Walter Cronkite cringed. Now we watch TV for everything: news, entertainment, sports, movies. . . everything. Much of the world goes hungry, lives under repressive regimes, or even lives in the dark ages, but America is the light of the world – and that light now is the blue flicker of TVs no more real than the shadows on the wall seen by the prisoners of Plato’s cave.
Helen Reddy roared, “I am Woman!” while we watched all sorts of improbably probabilities. We watched passively, brainlessly, blissfully as Jamie Lee Curtis’ tossed 300 pound goons around. We watched Demi Moore’s rewriting of the Scarlet Letter. The new religion was feminism and we group-thought, “Ah, this is a whole lot simpler.” The eschatological agony of the individual shifted to the small end of the telescope and became such a tiny speck that most viewers missed it altogether.
Women now filled the big end of the telescope. Not just one idealized woman but all of them. Just as activists had tried to levitate the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, the feminist tried to levitate all women to stand on the same pedestal. This was not a leveling of the sexes, but a secular elevation of the female sex. It was a gender love-in that often looked and felt . . . just wrong.
And work? Buried by the media and decades of affirmative action, Equal Opportunity Employer legislation, and a palpable bias against the sex-as-twigs, dead-beat dad, war mongering males, work coagulated into an ugly, politically correct ball of corporate sameness. The separation of labor based on the sexes that gave rise to civilization . . . was gone, and with its departure, so too was our sense of individualism and pride in our work. The feminist who had tried to reinvent society had instead turned America into a group-think sequel of Animal Farm.
Conclusion
Fortunately, feminism is dying out.
I don’t think anyone can look at the very public recent events at Hewlett Packard without wondering where the feminist are. First, Carly Fiorina is ousted from the world’s second largest software maker for being “imperious” (read bossy). Where are the feminist? She’s now running for the Senate against Barbara Boxer (a no-win for feminist). Then, the man who took her job, Mark Hurd was forced to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. That sounds better, no? But instead of going into PC purgatory, he walks away with a 40 million dollar severance package. The outrage! Then a week later he joins Oracle run by his pal Larry Ellison at a reported nine-hundred million dollar salary. I ask you, are the feminist all on vacation?
It sounds to me that the good-ole-boys have survived feminism intact. Feminism just isn’t that important in America anymore.
While I’m not sad to see the feminist finally get off the cultural stage, I do think they gave me something. When you throw out the excesses from both sides: the he wins who dies with the most toys and the if women ruled the world there would be no more wars, I know the sexes are not equal. Women do things that I am in awe of, infatuated with and as a man . . . love. But at bottom of the well of humankind, feminists do one thing well – they define me as a man. Whatever they do and say, I know I will feel a warm urgency to say the feminist don’t speak for me.
Forrest Greenwood 9/2010
The further we get from the heady days of draft-card and bra burning 1960s, the more the feminist movement fizzles out of our collective consciousness. As a set piece of media driven pop culture, feminism served some individuals well but society poorly. Not only was feminism one of the first social-engineering projects that bedevils America today, but it also lowered American wages and demeaned our sense of work.
Social Engineering
The Equal Rights Amendment was the rallying standard of the feminist movement. It failed to be ratified for a variety of reasons: The law did not create any new benefits for women; the law might have unintended consequences for women such as being subject to the draft and losing alimony/custody rights; and the law was not favored by labor unions or by the advocates of big labor. Since the 1980s, The ERA has become the handmaiden for the Pro-Choice or states-rights issues. The ERA continues to be re-introduced in Congress, but Terrorism, global warming, the economy and America’s sliding reputation in the world makes its passage less likely.
I raise the ERA not to pass judgment of the probity of the amendment, but to try and define what a feminist is. A feminist cannot be defined by his/her opposite because there is no male equivalent unless it is something that rhymes with sex-as-twigs. I also know that in the socio-babble of our group has a big tent, not all feminist are in favor of the ERA. Some like Eleanor Roosevelt who would stand up at the gates of Hell to protect the rights of women, were against the ERA. Some still are, but the semantics of the word remains vague.
What I am suggesting is that the ERA did not pass, and therein is the problem. Feminism was argued in the court of public opinion and in the media. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a piece of social engineering that prohibited discrimination in hiring on the basis of race or sex. But Women and minorities did not represent the same class of injustice. We could look at employment numbers and see (in part) how well or poorly we were doing in terms of racial fairness in hiring. And if the only way we could rock the system was to have quotas and affirmative action, so be it. But what do you do with women who represent a majority of the population?
The fires of female indignation were lit over the failure of the ER, and blazed over three decades of American history. In American culture women were portrayed as being – in every way – superior to men. “Ginger Rogers could dance as well as Fred Astaire, but she did it backwards while wearing high heels,” became the wide brush Feminist painted all arguments with. Society was redressing a wrong and things got crazy. Girls could play on boys’ college football teams that earned millions of dollars for the school, but boys could not play on girls’ volleyball teams that earned nothing. All other things being equal, women were often hired over men because the HR manager had a vague feeling this is what the politicians wanted. It was Politically Correct – and the new age of PC was born.
The politically correct flock swept down on academia like a scene from the Birds. In The New Sovereignty: Grievance groups have become a nation unto themselves (Harpers 1992) Shelby Steele wrote about the unintended consequence of the Civil Rights movement. Black studies and women’s studies were replacing a big chunk of the traditional curriculum at the college level. At the grammar school level, teachers who had bought into the feminist rhetoric were telling first grade girls that if they wanted to grow up to play linebacker for the Chicago Bears they could. From Frederick Douglas on we knew there was a difference in the struggle for fairness for minorities and fairness for women, but the feminist told us otherwise.
Looking back over the past forty years, it seems to me that the unintended, overall consequence of the feminist movement is that men in the US became suspect simply because of their sex. Much like Archimedes the feminist displaced, not water, but men. Men who built America came back from Vietnam to something less than ticker-tape parades . . . and the sneers only got louder over the passing years.
Luckily the fires of feminism are now dying down. When I say the Feminist movement was at best a wash, a female friend says “there are problems, but the movement was much better than a wash . . . .” I just go blank. I don’t know what to say.
Wages
Take two sets of photographs at home and at work. Take one set around 1910 and one set just before the recent economic crisis. In the 1910 set, women, including unmarried daughters, are at home, and men are in the fields or at work in factories and shops. In the 2007 picture both men and women, including wives and unmarried daughters, are at work and no one is at home - unless it is latch key kids watching TV for eight hours a day. I am not suggesting that women shouldn’t be allowed to work outside of the home. I am suggesting that there is a social cost for having your cake and eating it too.
Women began entering the workforce in significant numbers after WWII. Working women, whether they had just found a job or had been working for years, became de facto feminists. To be a woman and work outside the home was to become part of a historical struggle for female liberation. Books like the Feminist Mystique added fuel to the fire and called for redress. Women were told they could have it all. You go girl! The adage if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t, never darkened the door step of feminist thinking. Never.
The laws of supply and demand kicked in and with the surge of female job applicants wages paid went down – for men and women. A two income family became a necessity to survive, not as the feminist said, a chance for female fulfillment. Feminist began arguing for equal pay for equal work. There were certainly cases of this, but when these issues thinned out, the feminist turned their ire to the glass ceiling. The feminist began arguing that women needed fair access to the CEO classes - classes that had obscene salaries, perks and occasionally ended their notorious careers in a perp walks. With this, feminism cast adrift its constituency and lost its high ground.
In truth the feminist movement has always been bifurcated. In the top part were well educated women like Betty Friedan who articulated and sometimes screamed for redress and liberation. The much larger, lower part was made up of women working out of necessity and simply trying to make ends meet. The two parts never intersected in reality but often did in fiction and movies. Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich were successful movies not because the heroines did the right thing, but because they were women. Their foils, the bad guys who mistook the resolve and power of women, were men.
Men became dispirited. New terms came into the language like dead-beat dads and stuck to every man like napalm. There was no term for a man who kept up his financial commitments to his family even if the courts had taken his family away. Just as the word feminism has no opposite, there were no dead-beat moms.
Unfortunately, what we’ve lost in real wages we will never get back. Among other things, there is no feminist movement in the sweat-shop countries of the world.
The Demeaning of Work
We use to watch TV to escape from work. From Ozzie Nelson (Ozzie and Harriet 1952-1963) on what fictional characters do for work has been largely unknown and always unseen by the audience. The exhaustion, frustration, boredom, and fear of losing a job were left off-stage in favor of melodrama and the heightened emotion, not the heightened reality. Slowly, a world without work trumped reality and in the late 60s that melodramatic world began oozing into talk shows and even supposedly hard news programming while Willy Loman and Walter Cronkite cringed. Now we watch TV for everything: news, entertainment, sports, movies. . . everything. Much of the world goes hungry, lives under repressive regimes, or even lives in the dark ages, but America is the light of the world – and that light now is the blue flicker of TVs no more real than the shadows on the wall seen by the prisoners of Plato’s cave.
Helen Reddy roared, “I am Woman!” while we watched all sorts of improbably probabilities. We watched passively, brainlessly, blissfully as Jamie Lee Curtis’ tossed 300 pound goons around. We watched Demi Moore’s rewriting of the Scarlet Letter. The new religion was feminism and we group-thought, “Ah, this is a whole lot simpler.” The eschatological agony of the individual shifted to the small end of the telescope and became such a tiny speck that most viewers missed it altogether.
Women now filled the big end of the telescope. Not just one idealized woman but all of them. Just as activists had tried to levitate the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, the feminist tried to levitate all women to stand on the same pedestal. This was not a leveling of the sexes, but a secular elevation of the female sex. It was a gender love-in that often looked and felt . . . just wrong.
And work? Buried by the media and decades of affirmative action, Equal Opportunity Employer legislation, and a palpable bias against the sex-as-twigs, dead-beat dad, war mongering males, work coagulated into an ugly, politically correct ball of corporate sameness. The separation of labor based on the sexes that gave rise to civilization . . . was gone, and with its departure, so too was our sense of individualism and pride in our work. The feminist who had tried to reinvent society had instead turned America into a group-think sequel of Animal Farm.
Conclusion
Fortunately, feminism is dying out.
I don’t think anyone can look at the very public recent events at Hewlett Packard without wondering where the feminist are. First, Carly Fiorina is ousted from the world’s second largest software maker for being “imperious” (read bossy). Where are the feminist? She’s now running for the Senate against Barbara Boxer (a no-win for feminist). Then, the man who took her job, Mark Hurd was forced to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. That sounds better, no? But instead of going into PC purgatory, he walks away with a 40 million dollar severance package. The outrage! Then a week later he joins Oracle run by his pal Larry Ellison at a reported nine-hundred million dollar salary. I ask you, are the feminist all on vacation?
It sounds to me that the good-ole-boys have survived feminism intact. Feminism just isn’t that important in America anymore.
While I’m not sad to see the feminist finally get off the cultural stage, I do think they gave me something. When you throw out the excesses from both sides: the he wins who dies with the most toys and the if women ruled the world there would be no more wars, I know the sexes are not equal. Women do things that I am in awe of, infatuated with and as a man . . . love. But at bottom of the well of humankind, feminists do one thing well – they define me as a man. Whatever they do and say, I know I will feel a warm urgency to say the feminist don’t speak for me.
Forrest Greenwood 9/2010
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