We Were Feminists Once

by Andi Zeisler

  By the early 1990s, the political landscape was pocked with a bitter conventional wisdom that feminism had, if not outlived its usefulness, then certainly aided the creation of a culture of victimhood that infantilized girls and women, demonized men, and made sexual dynamics a minefield. Neoliberalism was curdling into an I’ve-got-mine-so-fuck-you attitude toward social responsibility, and there was a whole new corner of American media intent on mourning a time when nobody was forced to acknowledge things like inequality, institutional bias, or offensive language. “Political correctness” was referenced with barely hidden derision, as though it was just too exhausting for people to have to think about what they said or how they said it. “THOUGHT POLICE” boomed a 1990 cover story in Newsweek magazine, adding in its subtitle, “There’s a ‘politically correct’ way to talk about race, sex, and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment—or the New McCarthyism?” (Cue the portentous music.) The article itself detailed efforts on college campuses around the United States to broaden curriculums and increase tolerance, but the ostentatious quotation marks around terms like “diversity” and “multiculturalism” made clear that the reporters saw those things as pointless, oversensitive claptrap.

  It was here that the terms of postfeminism began to shift a bit, from exaggerated reports of feminism’s demise to the realm of what Ariel Levy would describe in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs as “loophole women”—those who believed themselves so evolved they had no need for the feminist fun police and their starchy ideology. Their leader was the grandstanding theorist Camille Paglia, whose early-’90s trio of books—Sexual Personae; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Vamps and Tramps—needled movement feminist gospel with all the glee of a teenager mooning a church picnic. For Paglia, the feminist movement’s fatal misstep was that it wanted to block off the male vitality that she claimed was naturally expressed in rape: “Feminism with its solemn Carrie Nation repressiveness cannot see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.” (Yes, well, our bad, I guess.) She found women in general to be lacking, in part because they just don’t pee with as much élan as men: “Male urination really is kind of an accomplishment, an arc of transcendence. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.” Though Paglia proclaimed herself (along with Madonna) to be culture’s staunchest feminist, she discredited any feminism other than her own as out-of-date victimology, sneering that the movement “has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.”

  As the decade went on, the Paglia school grew to include a handful of fellow loophole women who made the mainstream media’s job of trash-talking feminism a lot easier. Katie Roiphe, daughter of second-wave feminist author Anne Roiphe, made a media splash in 1993, when The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus was published. Roiphe had been covering what she skeptically called “date rape hysteria” for a year or so before the book was published; in it, she asserted that the rise of acquaintance-rape cases was the result of women primed by feminism to see themselves as victims. (Rather than, say, the outcome of no longer referring to a sexual assault as a “bad date,” as mothers like hers and mine did.) Though her thesis was little more than “I don’t know anyone who’s been raped, so it’s probably not a thing,” the twenty-five-year-old Roiphe, like Paglia, fancied herself to be offering a brave corrective to doctrinaire second-wave ideas of women as perpetual prey.

  Elsewhere in 1993, Naomi Wolf’s Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Define the 21st Century defined hard-charging “power feminism” as an alternative to—you guessed it—“victim feminism.” And though Rene Denfield’s 1995 book The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order contained some important challenges to liberal feminism’s erasure of nonwhite, non-middle-class women, it mostly focused on caricaturing feminists as emasculating, goddess-worshipping wingnuts. What all these authors had in common, both with each other and with the cultural climate, was the belief that no real value remained in collective action, that having the ability to transcend gender inequality was a project not of feminism, but of individual women who simply willed themselves to do so.

  As with postfeminism, glomming onto the irresistible image of the new guard flipping off the old allowed mainstream media to sidestep the challenge of actually understanding what third-wave feminism was up to, and instead reduce it to a catfight between fusty second-wavers and headstrong upstarts. The Morning After, Fire With Fire, and The New Victorians weren’t, for the most part, engaging with the flesh-and-blood young activists and thinkers who penned essays in foundational third-wave anthologies like Listen Up and To Be Real. They didn’t acknowledge the hip-hop feminism defined by Lisa Jones and Joan Morgan in Bulletproof Diva and When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, or the transnational feminisms of Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak. It was more accurate to describe the trio of books, as Astrid Henry did in Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism, as the work of women who simply “create[ed] a monolithic, irrelevant, and misguided second wave against which to posit their own brand of feminism.”

  This wasn’t just an intergenerational slap fight: it was also a narrowing of the lens through which media and pop culture would consequently view complicated social realities and changes. In the case of The Morning After and date rape, hugely influential media outlets like the New York Times took what Roiphe herself had termed an “impressionistic” survey of elite campus life and served it up as fact. In making her a spokesperson for feminism, such outlets used pushback against the book’s central failure of logic (date rape doesn’t exist, but if it happens it’s the victim’s fault) to buttress Roiphe’s caricature of whinging feminist indignation. And what Jennifer Gonnerman wrote in the 1994 Baffler article “The Selling of Katie Roiphe”— “Ultimately, Roiphe’s personal impressions defined the terms—and, more significantly, the limits—of the date rape debate”11—has turned out to be all too true. More than twenty years later, there’s undoubtedly a far more sophisticated dialogue about campus sexual assault (for starters, we don’t call it “date rape” as much), and a wealth of writing, advocacy, and policy to address it. And yet there remains a substantial number of people with big media mouthpieces who blame rape on everything but rapists; and debates about how best to address and combat campus rape are still stymied by the belief that women are either outright liars or simply unreliable witnesses to their own experiences.

  Postfeminist Fatigue

  The socially aware pop culture of the 1990s, not unlike that in the ’70s, was meaningful in part because it suggested that feminism could exist without being in-your-face political—or, if it was political, exist in a form where the fun parts outweighed the heavy ones. And most of it was pretty fun: the feminist hip-hop from Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, Monie Love and Digable Planets was a great alternative to the other women on MTV, most of whom were grinding behind lite-metal hair farmers like Warrant and Poison. Liz Phair and Garbage’s Shirley Manson offered up frank, saccharine-free songs about love, sex, and longing. Even the Beastie Boys pulled a notable progressive U-turn after several years of girl-disparaging lyrics and inflatable-penis stage props. Sassy magazine chronicled—indeed, fueled—the rise of youth-driven scenes like Riot Grrrl and encouraged their readers to resist and respond to sexism; Sassy’s short-lived brother publication, Dirt, hyped conscious hardcore and hip hop artists and prodded its teen-boy readers into considering girls as people, rather than as body parts to be conquered. HUES magazine, founded by three University of Michigan undergrads, was the first national magazine for multicultural women, just as serious about fomenting feminist dialogue as it was about showing models of all sizes, shapes, and colors. The rise of what was termed “lipstick feminism”—a reaction to the perceived feminist norm of shunning all cosmetics—reflected the third-wave idea that wearing makeup and caring about fashion could be as much about expressing individuality as
about capitulating to beauty imperatives. These were early manifestations of marketplace feminism: Sassy packaged feminism as a way for image-conscious teenagers to nonconform, and even independent cosmetics lines quietly reflected feminist sensibilities, from Urban Decay’s purposely unlovely color names (“Roach,” “Oil Slick”) to the quotes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Stila’s ecofriendly cardboard packaging.

  Still, caricatures of old-style sledgehammer dude-bashing made for much better copy. In 1991, Ohio’s small, liberal, and now-shuttered Antioch College became nationally famous when it took steps to adopt a comprehensive policy on sexual conduct. Among other things, the policy foregrounded enthusiastic verbal consent for each ascending level of contact (“Is it okay if I remove your shirt?”), and for that reason alone it was roundly mocked in most outlets. Never mind that the policy’s emphasis on transparency, communication, and active participation in sex (“a person cannot give consent while sleeping,” for instance) was eminently sane. The sheer amount of talking required by the policy, and the irresistible fact that it was drafted by a campus group called Womyn of Antioch, was a source of both outrage and amusement in media and popular culture. By 1993, the policy was a cultural punch line: Saturday Night Live mocked it with a faux game show called “Is it Date Rape?” that featured Beverly Hills 90210 star Shannen Doherty as a “Victimization Studies” major; the New York Times fretted that “legislating kisses” would take the spontaneity and excitement out of sexual exploration. Even those who agreed with the general aims of the policy weren’t exactly jumping up to support it. “Media coverage framed the Antioch policy in a way that divided men and women into groups with conflicting and competing interests, instead of portraying a policy that created a cohesive community devoted to eliminating the frequency with which sexual violence is perpetuated on college campuses,” recalled Kristine Herman, one of the students who helped draft the document.12

  As the 1990s continued, feminism began to assert itself with increasing enthusiasm, not only via multifaceted Third Wave theory and activism, but in the uncharted region of what was then called cyberspace, where a profusion of webrings, newsletters, and online bulletin boards were buzzing with feminists finding ways to utilize the new medium for theory, criticism, and activism. But in mass media, the Paglia-Roiphe brand of postfeminism offered convenient distance from past feminisms both real and imagined. BUST magazine, in a quiz called “Are You a Card-Carrying Feminist?” defined the postfeminist woman as one who “take[s] real responsibility for the shit they’re in, without blaming ‘the patriarchy’—a self-limiting, apologists’ concept that denies women the self-respect they’d otherwise gain from knowing that all their problems are of their own damn making. All feminists are accused of being humorless, but post-feminists really are.”13 Though BUST’s assessment was emphatically tongue-in-cheek, self-proclaimed postfeminists like the authors of the Web site Postfeminist Playground proved its point with screeds against what they saw as the hopelessly dull project of working toward gender equality, writing in the site’s introduction, “Postfeminists want to move on from feminism . . . the time for crabbing and bitching is over.” Though Susannah Breslin and Lily James, the site’s authors, delighted in offending those who weren’t advantaged enough to be able to “move on” from feminism, it was never clear what they did want in the way of ideological evolution. Breslin, in another BUST article titled “I Hate Feminism,” joined Paglia and Roiphe in painting all feminists as starchy condemners of sex and sex work. Yet all she had to do was look around her—or flip through the rest of BUST, for that matter—to see a spectrum of avidly pro-sex feminism that included author Susie Bright, the women of On Our Backs and the stripping chronicle Danzine, the rowdy spoken-word roadshow Sister Spit, the anthology Whores and Other Feminists, feminist cybersex pioneer Lisa Palac, and female-gaze pornographers like Nina Hartley and Candida Royalle.

  Mostly, these postfeminists wanted you to know that they were cool—you know, like men. The postfeminist didn’t mind when her male coworkers go to a strip club and don’t invite her. The postfeminist didn’t sweat being harassed on the street, because catcalling, per Paglia, honors men’s essential nature—and who doesn’t love a compliment? The postfeminist was tired of hearing about women not being paid equally or promoted proportionally, because complaining about anything was definitely not cool. Cris Mazza, an author who edited two anthologies of postfeminist fiction—1995’s Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and 1996’s Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics—introduced the concept of postfeminist writing in the books’ introductions primarily by stating what it wasn’t. Postfeminism was

  Not anti-feminist at all, but also not: my body, myself/my lover left me and I am so sad/all my problems are caused by men/. . . but watch me roar/what’s happened to me is deadly serious/society has given me an eating disorder/a poor self-esteem/a victim’s perpetual fear/. . . therefore I’m not responsible for my actions.

  In other words, postfeminism wasn’t antifeminism so much as it was a mockery of feminism as just too earnest. Mazza has since acknowledged that she had no familiarity with the term “postfeminism” before editing these anthologies, and allowed that her introduction of the term was decidedly “clumsy.”14 But at the time, the need to distance women’s writing—and women’s attitudes more broadly—from the sober realm of consciousness-raising groups and swath it in ironic, knowing distance was a very real phenomenon in which Mazza was far from alone. (As for the Postfeminist Playground women, for all their pro-sex chill, they weren’t too thrilled to find that a porn site poached their domain after they failed to renew it.)

  In 2006, Newsweek issued a mea culpa for the panic it sowed twenty years earlier with the single women/death-by-terrorist story, admitting to having incorrectly interpreted the study findings and invoking the story’s panicky framing as “a cautionary tale of what can happen when the media simplify complicated academic work.” Points for admitting it, but day late, dollar short, etc.: the media’s tendency to amplify even modest trends or events to declare a referendum on what feminism got wrong has, if anything, gotten even stronger since the 1980s.

  2009, for instance, sounded a new feminist death toll. Apparently, women just weren’t as happy as they once were. The linchpin of this narrative was an academic paper published that year (“The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers), but the general time period also saw the publication of similar studies based in the United States and abroad. Stevenson and Wolfers’ research revealed that women were both less happy than they were forty years ago and less happy relative to men, a finding that jibed with results from the other surveys to suggest a steady downward trend of aging women with declining joy levels. Stevenson and Wolfers didn’t press any specific takeaways from their conclusion that “a new gender gap” had opened up, but mainstream reporting on the study was thrilled to supply one: feminism strikes again.

  The headlines came fast and frenzied: “Women Are More Unhappy Despite 40 Years of Feminism,” “Liberated Women are Unhappy. Are You Surprised?” “Women Are Unhappy—Blame Feminism.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd quipped that “Blue is the New Black.” (“It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”) And though Dowd’s colleague Ross Douthat suggested in his own op-ed that the study invited readings from both pro- and anti- sides (feminists “will see evidence of a revolution interrupted, in which rising expectations are bumping against glass ceilings, breeding entirely justified resentments. The traditionalist will see evidence of a revolution gone awry, in which women have been pressured into lifestyles that run counter to their biological imperatives, and men have been liberated to embrace a piggish irresponsibility”), the title of his column—“Liberated and Unhappy”—offered resounding editorial judgment on the source of women’s bummer attitudes.

  Twenty ye
ars after the original media backlash, blaming feminism was still a slam-dunk story simply because people remained eager to believe it. Even the most intelligent and well-reasoned rebuttals usually didn’t register. Investigative reporter Barbara Ehrenreich, for instance, was thorough in her assessment of the critical blind spots in Stevenson and Wolfers’ study and the way it was reported: she pointed out that despite the supposed happiness gender gap, rates of suicide for women were falling, while men’s remained “roughly constant” during a research period of thirty-four years. Ehrenreich also pointed out that Stevenson and Wolfers ignored the data point in which the happiness of black women and men was actually trending upward.15 And finally, she highlighted the study’s most striking inference: contrary to what most of them had been told via social, religious, and cultural channels, marriage and children were absolutely no guarantee of happiness for women. But whatever study finding didn’t fit the narrative that outlets wanted to publish—Feminism has failed women! In your face, Gloria Steinem!—was absent from their sad-ladies analysis.

  As with the story about single women and terrorists, the suggestion that women’s unhappiness is due to feminism itself still reverberates loudly as a media and pop culture trope, falling somewhere between “ladies be shopping” and “casual sex will definitely kill you” in frequency. It doesn’t help, of course, that individual women occasionally validate this narrative by suggesting that the tenets of women’s liberation “duped” them into thinking that life was going to be, I don’t know, free ponies and ice cream. It doesn’t seem to register that it wasn’t feminists themselves who sold that fantasy, but a media culture that toggles between soft-pedaling and weaponizing feminist imagery and rhetoric.