This is What a Feminist Looks Like

I finished reading a book tonight loaned to me by my amazing 21 year old daughter who is majoring in Women's Studies at UWEC.  While I agreed heartily with everything between the covers of "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" by Ariel Levy and felt that it exposed a topic more people needed to take a deeper look at, I felt uncomfortable broaching the topic on Blogger or Facebook. I decided that the very fact that I felt uncomfortable bringing it up was a pretty good indication that I probably should!

The author explores the new "raunch" culture, where "empowered women" bare all for Girls Gone Wild, pursue casual sex as if it were a sport, and embrace behavior that once would have been considered the domain of male chauvinist pigs. She argues that what women are promoting as liberating is actually sending women's rights backward and leading our young women on a path that can lead nowhere good. She covers the beginnings of the women's movement and how she thinks we got from there to here. How did Sex and the City, Paris Hilton, little girls wearing thongs, Playboy bunnies, strippers and the porn industry come to represent what young women of today aspire to become? Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"...It can be fun to be exceptional..to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress."

"If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions - that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smoke-screen for how far we  haven't come."

"In 2004 our forty-second president, George W. Bush, the leader of the free world, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to forever ban gay marriage - which was already illegal. If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex that they turn their attention - during wartime - to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated."

"If we believed that we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like strippers or like men or like anyone other than our own specific, individual selves."

It's easy to believe the war for equality has been won. Sometimes we need someone to remind us that it's still worth fighting for. My daughter does that for me, I hope today maybe I did that for someone else!