by Andi Zeisler
A Passion for Bashin’
As the film version of The Witches of Eastwick illustrated, the specter of uppity white women hoisted by their own petard of liberation was Hollywood gold. Anxiety about what the women’s movement would mean for the nuclear family and for heterosexual love had been a theme in a handful of the movies produced as the second wave unfolded. Films like Up the Sandbox, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York offered a window into women’s frustration with traditional gender roles, as well as their well-socialized instinct to resist rebellion. Others, like The Stepford Wives and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, directly linked freedom and danger. But postfeminist popular culture was unequivocal in portraying liberated woman as either manipulative shrews upending men’s lives with their unholy mix of sexual independence and emotional neediness, or unhinged victims of their own ambition. In Kramer vs. Kramer, for instance, selfish career woman Joanna needs to “find herself,” leaving her hapless husband to raise a child he’s barely interacted with. Jane Craig, Broadcast News’s neurotic star producer, can’t move up the career ladder without plummeting down the romantic one. And Jill Davis, the ex-wife to Woody Allen’s Isaac in Manhattan, is portrayed as an ice queen who publishes a warts-and-more-warts account of their marriage, and an emasculating lesbian. (Both Jill and Joanna were played by Meryl Streep; make of that what you will.)
On the small screen, the stories were often similar: some of TV’s most prominent female characters were the conniving, backbiting matriarchs of prime-time soaps like Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Knots Landing, who undercut the idea that sisterhood is powerful with copious hair pulling and bitch slapping. This was feminism as individual power struggle, and the women involved ruthlessly sacrificed anything that stood in the way of their ascent to wealth and control.4 In the relatively new genre of workplace procedural dramas like L.A. Law, St. Elsewhere, and Hill Street Blues, female characters who chose work over family paid dearly (and dramatically) for it with nervous breakdowns, drug addictions, and vengeful husbands. Adding to TV’s generally retrogressive vibe was the popular rise of televangelism, which, though it existed before the 1980s, assumed its place in cultural dialogue as Ronald Reagan aligned his presidency with fundamentalist Christianity. Ministries like Jim and Tammy Bakker’s PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and Jimmy Swaggart’s Assemblies of God attracted monster audiences to their small-screen sermons. Though you could argue that they were most often preaching to the converted, it wasn’t long before their theatrical denunciations of divorce, homosexuality, the ERA, and women working outside the home oozed into the sightline of secular audiences.
And then there’s our friend Fatal Attraction. The blockbuster was initially conceived and made by its British writer, James Dearden, as a short film called Diversion that focused on the moral consequences of a man’s affair. As its original champion, Hollywood producer Sherry Lansing recalled, “What I liked in the short film is that the man is made responsible. That there are consequences for him . . . And that’s what I wanted to convey in our film. I wanted the audience to feel great empathy for the woman.”5 But after Lansing brought the script to Paramount, Dearden was pressured to rewrite the story so that it no longer lingered on the moral grays of imperfect people, instead casting the man as utterly innocent and the woman as an unhinged neurotic whose sexual freedom and great career can’t make up for the family she really wanted. Director Adrian Lyne was blunt in his scorn for liberated women—“Sure, you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman”—and star Michael Douglas was equally disparaging, saying, “If you want to know, I’m really tired of feminists, sick of them. . . . Guys are going through a terrible crisis right now because of women’s unreasonable demands.” Such vehement ire left no room for nuance. The film’s original ending—in which homewrecker Alex commits suicide, in the process framing innocent, pentitent Dan for murder—was vetoed in favor of having Dan and his wife defend themselves against the homicidal Alex. (Twenty-five years after Fatal Attraction was released, Dearden finally got to produce the story he’d originally written, as a stage play in London.)
The era’s onscreen image of a sexually independent black woman was just as controversial, if somewhat less melodramatic. In Spike Lee’s debut feature, 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, the “she” of the title is Nola Darling, an artist with three lovers who hate each other on principle, but hate Nola even more for daring to be unapologetic about her desires. Her blithe attitude toward sex, in their eyes, makes her a “freak” and a “nympho”—there are simply no neutral terms for a woman who enjoys sex but doesn’t link it to love or long-term relationships. The dramatic peak of the film comes toward its end, when Nola’s lover Jamie hurls her down on a mattress and rapes her while demanding to know “Whose pussy is this?” It’s not meant to be horrifying; instead, it’s depicted as the only way Nola can be “tamed” into a proper woman and partner. Reviewing the film at the time it was released, black feminist Cora Harris lamented that the rape seemed meant to be read as an action provoked by Nola’s autonomy, rather than by Jamie’s macho possessiveness: “In Spike Lee’s own words,” Harris wrote, “Nola is ‘acting like a man’—a pseudo male. And in thus stepping outside [the] ‘women’s role,’ Nola is fair game for depression, nightmares, and rape.”6 Lee, who is currently rebooting She’s Gotta Have It as a series for the Showtime network, told Deadline Hollywood in a 2014 interview that the one regret of his career was the rape scene: “If I was able to have any do-overs, that would be it.”
When most people consider the source of feminism’s bad reputation, the images are of loud, marching women agitating for their rights while wearing unflattering slacks—an army of Andrea Dworkins. But the media and pop culture images that accompanied the backlash were at least as destructive. As someone who came to feminism as a teenager in the ’80s, my ability to articulate ideas and opinions—even to friends and family—was absolutely tempered by the animosity that was baked into so much of the decade’s pop products. There was a dissonance between what women and girls were told we had—equality, full stop—and what we often experienced, but the language to talk about it was, for most of us, still out of reach.
Waving, Not Drowning
Among the fearsome stereotypes constructed in 1980s political, economic, and social culture—the money-grubbing yuppie birthed by Wall Street, the Cadillac-driving welfare queen conjured up by Reaganomics—the Feminist was both abstract and deeply potent. In her 1991 book Feminist Fatale, journalist Paula Kamen surveyed the toll of the backlash on her generation, finding overwhelmingly that the young, diverse women and men she interviewed supported the goals of feminism but shunned the word itself; only about 16 percent were willing to use it to describe themselves. That jibes with attitudes I encountered in my initial forays into college feminism in the early 1990s; I can recall one meeting of a burgeoning student feminist club at which three-quarters of the allotted time was spent debating whether putting the word itself on banners in the student center would be “too much.” The stereotypes that haunted us were legion, as Kamen wrote: “bra-burning, hairy-legged, amazon, castrating, militant-almost-antifeminine, communist, Marxist, separatist, female skinheads, female supremacists, he-woman types, bunch-a-lesbian, you-know-dykes, man-haters, man-bashers, wanting-men’s-jobs, want-to-dominate-men, want-to-be-men, wear-short-hair-to-look-unattractive, bizarre-chicks-running-around-doing-kooky-things, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar, uptight, angry, white-middle-class radicals.”
But in 1991, there was a crucial moment, a portent that galvanized many young people like those Kamen interviewed into realizing that, hairy-legged or not, feminism was a far-from-finished project. It came in the form of the congressional hearings that confirmed Clarence Thomas as a U.S. Supreme Court justice and made law professor Anita Hill a household name. If there was one event that was poised to refute the lie of postfeminism, it was the televised hearings that found Hill recalling her
treatment by Thomas, her former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It’s hard to overstate how groundbreaking the hearings were in the understanding of sexual harassment: they marked the first time many viewers—myself included—realized that there was a name for behavior that we were expected to laugh off or be flattered by in our school and work environments. For the young women who had grown up being assured that they were equal in potential to boys, that they had unheard-of choice and opportunity, the hearings were an unsettling revelation about what it meant to be a woman in public life still defined by men. And for women of color, many of whom already felt erased by the tacit whiteness of both feminism and postfeminism, it was a reminder of what Frances Beal called the “double jeopardy” of race and gender in her 1969 essay of the same name. (In Anita, the 2014 documentary about the hearings, Hill acknowledged, “I couldn’t be a black woman and a woman.”)
My college suitemates and I rushed back from the dining hall to watch the hearings with the same urgency we brought to weekly viewings of Beverly Hills, 90210. Seeing the cloud of disdain that enveloped Hill both inside and well beyond the hearings was terrifying. On Capitol Hill, on news reports, on talk shows, and in newspapers, there was a widespread reluctance to accept Hill’s accounts—and, by extension, to accept the idea that sexual harassment was a thing that existed. As she faced down the row of skeptical, pale males that made up the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hill’s very right to exist seemed in question. (“Are you a scorned woman?” demanded square-jawed senator Howell Heflin, trying to find a reason why Hill would agree to speak against Thomas; the entire panel seemed largely to forget that it was they who subpoenaed her in the first place.)
Many black men and women resented Hill for betraying a putative brother who, even if they didn’t care for his conservative politics, stood positioned to be a landmark addition to America’s highest court. More than a few well-meaning women (including, I’m sad to say, my mother) wondered whether Hill had done something to “lead him on.” And a hum of media chatter about “oversensitivity” and “boys will be boys” permeated the atmosphere of the hearings, a sense that Hill’s objection to talk of pubic hair and penis size in the offices of the EEOC was a case of feminism run amok. In the often surreal circus of the hearings, even Senate Judiciary members who seemed somewhat sympathetic to Hill managed to undermine her at every turn. It’s hard to forget, for instance, that our now-lovable VP Joe Biden, as chairman of the committee, not only refused to call on Hill’s key witnesses, but basically rolled out a red carpet for Thomas, assuring him that he had “the benefit of the doubt” and failing to query Senator Alan Simpson about letters and faxes that Simpson claimed had been sent warning him to “watch out for this woman” about “this sexual harassment crap.”7
The hearings may have been an unwanted catalyst for a national conversation about sexual harassment, but they did force a mainstream media that for more than a decade had been content to declare feminism dormant or dead to take notice. Shortly after Thomas was confirmed, a full-page statement appeared in the New York Times, stating that “many have erroneously portrayed the allegations against Clarence Thomas as an issue of either gender or race. As women of African descent, we understand sexual harassment as both. . . . This country, which has a long legacy of racism and sexism, has never taken the sexual abuse of black women seriously.” It ended with a declaration: “We pledge ourselves to continue to speak out in defense of one another, in defense of the African American community and against those who are hostile to social justice, no matter what color they are. No one will speak for us but ourselves.” The signatories, 1,603 in number, had pooled their money to purchase the $50,000 ad—as critical-race theory scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw later noted, “buy[ing] themselves into the discourse”8—and declared themselves African American Women in Defense of Ourselves. The fact that the women paid for their voices to be heard underscored that feminist identity was more complex and more necessary than most media was willing to acknowledge.
The Hill/Thomas hearings are widely credited with prompting a resurgence of vocal feminism and prodding young women in particular toward the realization that, unlike Susan Bolotin’s “post-feminist generation” refuseniks, they couldn’t take for granted the efforts of those who had fought on their behalf. Rebecca Walker, daughter of the eminent second-wave author, poet, and womanist Alice Walker, was one of them. The younger Walker’s debut as an activist came in the special issue of Ms. published several months after the hearings, in which she revisited the rage the televised character assassination had brewed up in her. “I am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of women. Each of my choices will have to hold to my feminist standard of justice,” she wrote. But the essay’s last line—“I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave”—was its knockout punch: a stand-up-and-cheer rebuttal to the backlash. The response to the essay was overwhelming, and shortly after its publication, Walker, along with Shannon Liss, founded Third Wave Direct Action Corporation with the aim of translating the passion of young feminists into social and political change.
The early articulations of what was promptly dubbed “third-wave feminism” came not from single-author polemics or manifestos, but from compendiums of writing about activism, identity, and social-change potential by a racially and politically mixed group of mostly young, mostly female writers. The first of these, both published in 1995, were To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, edited by Walker, and Listen Up: Voices from the New Feminist Generation, edited by Ms. executive editor Barbara Findlen. The essays in both books spanned a range of subject matter: ethnicity and beauty standards, subverting familial expectations, sexism and hip-hop, navigating sexualities, and more. But what both had in common was a sense that their contributors were grappling not just with the entrenched, still-extant limitations imposed by gender, but with the limitations of the feminist label itself. They struggled under the inherited baggage of previous feminisms, wondering aloud how to honor the toil, the successes, and the failures that came before while doing things a bit differently. And they acknowledged that what they knew as monolithic, big-F feminism had bred an unconscious guilt in them: they had new tools, but so much unfinished labor.9
Straw Feminist, Meet Loophole Women
Chronologically speaking, American third-wave feminists (I include myself in this group) were the symbolic children—if not, like Walker, the actual children—of a generation that in large part was politicized during the 1960s and 70s. Between national water and oil shortages, an overseas hostage crisis, “stagflation,” drug epidemics, an ever-looming threat of nuclear war, Son of Sam, and a vogue in unnatural fibers, the world in which we grew up was not exactly utopia. But pop culture with a social conscience: that we had. We were the beneficiaries of Title IX who watched Billie Jean King thump Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes.” We knew every word of Free to Be You and Me, the soundtrack of a liberal-leaning childhood on which burly football star/needlepoint enthusiast Rosey Grier assured us that “It’s Alright To Cry” and Carol Channing’s “Housework” dismantled the advertising industry. We had the TV empire of Norman Lear, whose slate of topical, race-and class-conscious sitcoms lobbed issues like abortion, racism, white flight, and rape directly toward the nation’s Barcaloungers. Even toys were sort of enlightened: Elizabeth Sweet, a doctoral candidate at University of California–Davis, recently studied changes in Sears-catalogue toy ads, and found that 1975 was the peak of gender-neutral toy marketing, with 70 percent of such ads making no overtures to gender at all and a good number of them consciously “def[ying] gender stereotypes by showing girls building and playing airplane captain, and boys cooking in the kitchen.”10
We didn’t necessarily talk about social justice movements in elementary school, but almost every part of our lives was shaped in some way by feminist and civil rights activism, and plenty of us were lucky enough n
ot to know just how lucky we were. Regardless of whether the mothers, fathers, grandparents, and guardians of America aligned themselves with women’s liberation as a political movement, a social consciousness had been established in the mainstream, solidified with legislation, and disseminated by media and pop culture. But as we grew, so did a creeping sense that maybe this equality stuff had been overpromised. The elementary-school teachers who scolded girls for playing “too rough” with boys in schoolyard kickball or tag became the high-school teachers who expressed doubt that girls could “really understand” physics. And all the while, the double standards for dating and sex remained unyielding.
Susan Sturm, a professor at Columbia University’s law school, uses the term “second-generation bias” to describe the sexism and racism tucked unassumingly away in schools, corporations, and other institutions that have supposedly been “fixed” by the gains of women’s and civil rights movements. If “first-generation” bias took the form of explicit barriers to autonomy and achievement—college departments that refused to admit women and racial minorities, illegal contraception, gender- and race-segregated want ads—the second-generation form was far more subtle and likely to be explained and internalized as an individual matter. The insidiousness of second-generation gender bias—informal exclusion, lack of mentors and role models, fear of conforming to stereotypes—colluded with the ideological spread of neoliberalism to recast institutional inequity as mere personal challenges. If women now had the right to do most everything a man could do, went the logic, then any obstacles or failures weren’t systemic, they were individual and could be remedied by simply being better, faster, stronger, wealthier. This was the fertile environment in which a new iteration of postfeminism—call it “I’m-not-a-feminist-but” feminism—was taking root in opposition to the third wave, and, not coincidentally, catching the attention of mainstream media and pop culture.