It’s like feminism never happened
March 24, 2009
by Violet Socks, Editor
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Results from the Boston Public Health Commission's survey of teens on the Rihanna/Chris Brown case
Recent events have made me wonder despairingly whether decades of modern feminism have made any significant dent at all in the quality of relationships between young women and men.
The Web chatter by teenage girls who have been casually forgiving of rapper Chris Brown’s alleged battering of his girlfriend, singer Rihanna, has stymied me. If you judge by some of the posts, many girls seem to think she must have done something to provoke it, or that she is equally to blame. A New York Times story last week, headlined “Teenage girls stand by their man,” quoted one Grade 9er: “She probably made him mad for him to react like that. You know, like, bring it on?”
Timson sees more of the same — or worse, really — in the MT murder case in Toronto, in which a 17-year-old girl talked her boyfriend into murdering a 14-year-old girl, apparently in exchange for sexual favors:
These vile text messages, flatly discussing “bj’s” and “bang bangs” and fuelled by the obsessive irrational hatred of one girl toward another, depicted an emotional landscape devoid of respect, conscience or heart. They also revealed a very retro scenario – a monster girl who thinks her power lies in bitchily, and then murderously, vanquishing another girl.
In these cases, girls see other girls as the enemy in the endless hand-to-hand combat to capture guys. Chris Brown is better off outta there, say those girls. Don’t you know?
I bolded the part that is crucial, the part that I keep talking about incessantly to my friends/family/dog/wall, the part about how this behavior is profoundly pre-feminist. This is how women are trained to behave under patriarchy: all value and status flow from men, so women must compete with each other for access to men and the resources they control.
Eavesdropping on the thoughts of these hate-full (I use the term with precision) young women is, for me, like traveling in a time machine. This is how women ruthlessly cut each other down in the days before feminism. Read nineteenth century novels, check out the diatribes of anti-feminist women at the fin de siècle, watch an old B-movie from the 50s. It’s the patriarchal snakepit.
That’s why the first job of Second Wave feminism in the late 1960s was consciousness-raising: bringing women together to deconstruct these patterns and understand how we had not just been brainwashed into accepting our subordinate status, but also how we’d been pitted against each other from girlhood.
But today, after decades of backlash, it’s as if feminism never happened:
Many boy-girl relationships today have become a retro minefield because of the confluence of several things.
First, there has been the sexualization of young women very early in their teens, so that being “hot” and attracting boys becomes an early measurement of their worth, and remains that way well into adulthood.
Second, there’s been a devaluing of feminism and its true principles in the media and popular culture. Feminism has been both trivialized – softened into what I call “you go girl-ism” – and demonized by exaggerating scary things such as man hatred.
The frustrating thing, Timson says, is that “teenage girls today have been given every single tool they need to gain their own equality: the words, the books, the laws; the examples everywhere of women, sometimes their own mothers, achieving at work and living in respectful and equal domestic relationships.”
Yes — but. Here I part company with Timson. Girls have not been given every tool. The anti-feminist backlash has been too strong. The deeply-rooted social patterns that Second Wave feminism starting chipping away at are still largely intact, like icebergs under the surface. A girl today grows up with a working mom and laws guaranteeing equality, but almost everything she watches on TV, hears on the radio, sees in the movies, reads in magazines, and buys at the store reinforces the age-old message: men run the world, and women are the sex class.
Add to that the particularly toxic flavor of modern culture — brutal and degrading pornography, hip-hop that glorifies violence and abuse of women, “torture porn” movies, even magazine ads designed to look like rape scenes — and it’s no wonder girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny.
We need to re-start feminism. We need to re-start the consciousness-raising, the remedial lessons, the basic 101 stuff. We need to bring our message to every woman and girl — and every man and boy — in this country.
If I have one wish for The New Agenda, it’s that we can recapture the clarity and power of the Second Wave. Except this time, we won’t let ourselves get bogged down and fractured and backlashed into oblivion.
Excellent article. I’m so glad I took a few extra minutes this morning to finish it.
Do you know if Susan Faludi discussed an internal backlash in her book of the same name? Recently, in my politics and poetry class, I have come across some examples of so-called feminists who bitterly criticized white married feminists. I’m in the process of planning a paper on the effects of this rhetoric, which I believe played a major role in silencing women during the 1980s and into the 1990s. I need to check out Faludi’s book, I guess!
Anyway, my point is, we have to fight them all, even patriarchy-enabling women. We’re going to have to go in and yank our children away and try to yank those women away too. It won’t be easy. They don’t want to believe they’ve been victimized, just as Rhianna and the Boston girls do not want to believe they are victims. That’s one thing I think we’re going to have figure out–how to get past that defensive tendency.
Wow Violet. What a timely article – esp given the Monserrate story as well.
We need to work together all and be a bold voice! Starting now and continuing on…..
Thanks, Anna Belle and Amy.
Amy, I was thinking that too, about the Monserrate story.
But even pre-feminism it was never acceptable to want death of another (for frivolous reasons) or to cause the death of another.
Isn’t there something else going on with the Toronto case?
I see a problem with a girl hating another girl so much that she wants her dead–that is clear to me that it’s related to sexism and misogyny in society.
But this line in the article from Timson doesn’t compute: “In these cases, girls see other girls as the enemy in the endless hand-to-hand combat to capture guys.”
The girl with the murderous desires, MT, already had her guy, she wasn’t trying to get him from the other girl.
And Violet, you say: “all value and status flow from men, so women must compete with each other for access to men and the resources they control.”
In this Toronto case, I don’t see this being the case. In this case, the girl,MT, controlled the resource, sex, and her boyfriend wanted it so he killed for it.
At least in this Toronto case it doesn’t apply.
The poll taken of Boston teenagers and their reaction to the Rhianna incident–I think what the results reflect is the belief that violence is acceptable. The teens are just stating the obvious: Yes, of course Rhianna provoked Chris, and that is why Chris beat her. I think if Chris was with a close male friend and the same thing happened, the polls would have said the same thing: Joe provoked Chris, so Chris beat him up. So Joe is responsible for provoking Chirs into beating him.
The problem I see is the belief of teenagers that if someone provokes you, it is okay to act violently, instead of walking away, or choosing a peaceful course of interaction.
MT was insanely jealous and believed that the younger girl was a rival for her boyfriend’s affections. That’s why she wanted the girl dead. As the case has been presented, she persuaded her boyfriend to kill the younger girl.
It reminds me a little bit of a case here in the States about 10 or 15 years ago — similar situation, insanely jealous girlfriend who was obsessed with the possibility that her boyfriend still was attracted to or harbored feelings for another girl. She reached the point where the only thing that would satisfy her would be for the boyfriend to kill the other girl, thus both eliminating the “rival” and proving his loyalty to the murderous girlfriend.
Also, please note that sex is not a “resource” in the same way that the power, status, and wealth controlled by men are resouces. Sex is simply the only tool (or one of the few tools) women have to bargain with to get those resources from men. It’s women’s currency of exchange. In a total patriarchy, every woman must f*k for her supper one way or another, whether she’s a prostitute or a wife.
The MT case is classic patriarchal behavior. MT dangled the lure of sex because in a patriarchal society where women are the sex class, that’s what women do to get men.
Thanks for clarifying, Violet. The article I read didn’t give a reason for MTs hate towards the other girl. I am still unclear though. Something doesn’t make sense.
So her boyfriend just wants to get into MTs pants, and is willing to kill for it, and he tells MT he likes this other girl. And if he likes this other girl too, how can he bring himself to kill her?
I’m not trying to be difficult, but I guess I just don’t understand. If there’s a good resource to go to so I can read more about the details of this case, would you post it?
Thank you!
About your last post, she dangled the sex lure not to get him, but to get him to kill for her. So if she’s using it as a tool to get a resource from the would be killer, what resources was she after from him, that she couldn’t get just by having sex with him?
Again, not trying to be difficult. I appreciate your responses.
I think you’re attributing an overly-literal moral calculus to the girl in question. Girls grow up understanding that getting a man and keeping a man is what matters, that being sexually appealing to men is the measure of their self-worth. They don’t grow up with a textbook of equations like:
giving sex –> man = access to material resource
That equation is the underpinning structure of the patriarchal economy, not the thinking that’s necessarily going on in most of our heads. Unless we’re gold-diggers or women marrying for money or position, or a prostitute turning a trick. But even if we’re none of those things, the fundamental structure permeates our culture and our thinking. And god knows, many of the men who become the targets of women’s competitive machinations are themselves worthless sacks of crap.
can we discuss victimhood?
nobody wants to be the victim or accept of having been victimized. the acceptance of the state of powerlessness is too scary and frightening.
way back during the second wave when I volunteered in a rape crisis center, the women clearly knew that they were victimized, but tried to get on with their lives, try to figure out what they did wrong. probably trying to find patterns how to avoid the experience.
I think part of the outcome of the study cited above has to do with the unimaginable thought that each of us could be a victim.
can we learn from the fight against racism? How did African Americans cope with the fact of being victims, call it out all the time and still stayed upbeat for their fight.
I think somehow women mostly behave as the big girls and quickly bury any defeats deep in their consciousness, thereby ignoring and forgetting all the shameful experiences.
and thanks Violet for another excellent article.
It is like feminism never happened, and then again, this is the response TO feminism. It tells us loud and clear that nothing so threatens the social order than women who truly value themselves, each other, have no need for male approval, and cannot be brainwashed into being doormats and porn objects.
The cultural assault on and backlash against girls and women these past three decades has been massive, unrelenting, and ever-escalating. Girls and boys are bombarded from toddlerhood by the pornified misogynist culture. The consciousness of girls and young women (not all of course, but in general) today is actually lower than it was before the women’s liberation movement. So many girls seem to have no center, no core, no sense of themselves at all. Very different from when I was in high school.
IMO things have gotten much worse, AND the ugly reality that has always been there — the 9/10 of the iceberg under the surface — has been exposed. Yet we would never know that from the euphemistic language that denies even the simple fact that violence meant to intimidate, control, degrade, and dehumanize the other is overwhelmingly male against female. CHILD sexual abuse, HUMAN trafficking, TEEN dating violence, DOMESTIC violence all erase the patriarchal reality.
It starts early – look at the most popular Disney movies – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White – and some more recent ones like Aladdin – the mother figure is either dead by the time the story begins or she dies in the beginning (Bambi) and the child is raised by the father and/or evil stepmother. Girls are taught to disregard their own mother’s influence and to trust in their fathers, and then to magically transmit that trust to their husbands (how else can you just marry someone who kisses you to wake you from a coma, and whose name you don’t even know??!).
I won’t let my daughter watch Disney (she is 3 now, but I suspect it will come to a head when she gets older and knows what she is missing).
Did anyone see the article on Yahoo News over the weekend (cannot find a link to it now) about how in these poor economic times many women are turning to adult entertainment to make ends meet. Pole dancing and stripping are the most popular ones, and the women can make up to $100,000 to $300,000 per year in cash! Nice to see that women can still trade their looks in for money when the economy tanks…
sigh.
On another note, I think we should look at such things as environmental pollutants causing behavioral and developmental problems in addition to cultural over-exposure. It’s possible that exposure to chemical toxins during childhood is also making children more susceptible to the influence of strong cultural images, in addition to re-wiring their brains. (I am a scientist & researcher, by the way!).
just a thought…
Good article, Violet.
I got three girls and from day one we have been battling this cultural push that pits girls against each other. Like a broken record I’ve repeated from first grade on that sisterhood is powerful. You better learn how to hold hands and stick together.
I could sure relate to this sentence, “Shame on girls, too, for being so savagely and even dangerously mean to each other in order to get the guy. This kind of behaviour shows a lack of self-respect and even a lack of ambition.” Sounds harsh and I’d never advocate adding more public shame to girls, but I think we as older feminists, as mothers, need to take girls aside on playgrounds, in restaurants, wherever you find them engaging in nastiness towards each other, and remind them, sisterhood is powerful. They must learn to fight the cultural push that makes them compete against each other for the ultimate prize, which is supposed to be some man. That’s all wrong, we need to tell girls they must learn to rely first on themselves, next on their girlfriends, and if some man comes along, that’s just icing on the cake.
This is another great post Violet. I cringe when I look at what the fashion industry, Hollywood and the plastic surgeons are doing to all women, young and old. It is all about objectifying women to keep them in their proper place. Professional women who do not meet the “ideal” are ridiculed for not being “pretty” or “sexy” enough(think Hillary Clinton and her pant suits), and if they do, they are also ridiculed as bimbos (think Sarah Palin). Either way, women are supposed to remain in the “sex class”. I know many women my age (mid 50′s) who still think they cannot survive without a man and are more than willing to give up their women friends and identity in order to be with a man, for the sake of having a man in their life. Many more stay in toxic relationships for fear of being alone, or having no identity without a man to define who they are, or more accurately, who they should be.
We really do need to get back to the basics with feminism 101 and somehow get women to understand that until we start sticking together and collectively working towards our own interests instead of proping up men so they can continue to control the agenda, and define who we should be, nothing is going to change, ever.
Violet, excellent post. But I have to say, I am not that young, but even when I was growing up, it seemed like feminism had never happened. From my own training by British immigrant parents (and I was a teen during the Reagan and Thatcher years) there were no ceilings placed on me, no prisons built around me, at all. I was expected to do extremely well at school, and my dad pushed me harder than his sons in that regard. He must have known the sexism I’d face in the corporate world, but he never said a thing, even though the only women working in his offices were secretaries. As far as I knew, women could do anything men could do, and there was nothing standing in their way.
But in my teen years, growing up in America, I got messages from videos, music, and films that said my value came from my appearance. My sexual attractiveness as a young female began to have far more weight in my peer group than any powers of the mind I might possess. Madonna was all the rage, and it seemed that girls were as determined to be every bit as sexually aggressive as boys…and with the advent of rap, hip hop, and booty-shaking in the camera, the message young girls get is loud and clear: you are a sexual object to be used by men, as parts. Fake boobs, fake butt cheeks are meant to put in what nature didn’t give you and elevate you up the social ladder in terms of sexual desirability. And getting a man is your top priority. Without one, something must be wrong with you. So then the Rihanna situation and the girls’ reaction to it makes sense: since you ain’t nothin’ without a man, your job is to keep him happy. You don’t have the right to happiness yourself. So if you piss him off, it’s his right to hit you…
Or something along those lines. I see it in a local high school here. The girls in dance class come in with black eyes, and they think it’s normal for their boyfriends to hit them.
Because at least they have boyfriends.
For this group, and me before them, it IS like feminism never happened. In our rush to be as sexually aggressive as the men, we again fell into the masculine trap of competitiveness. This keeps girls fighting each other, lost in a little fishbowl of a school social competition. They’re not even seeing feminine presidential politics, nor are they inspired by female role models because Rihanna is living out their story on the news.
Sorry, I ran on, but this one got me…Humph.
I think what could be more of an influence on girls is for feminists to start their own commercially viable media aimed at fostering young women and with the internet it should be much easier to do than it would have been even 10 years ago. Start an internet magazine that has constantly nurturing, informative, interactive and always changing content that the girls can come to for support each day. I would also divide this content into tabs so they can check only what they are READY to read. For instance hard core feminists are not going to get off the lesbianism and violence against women topics (we live in a violent society all violence is of concern I think homicidal violence is the 5th leading cause of death among men but not women which does not mean violence against women is a problem) but many girls who are READY to hear an empowering and constant feminist message do not want to be randomly hit with these topics when they log on. So don’t cut out these topics but tab them so the interested girls can go there and the other girls don’t have to until they are READY. It is time that feminists learn to write not just for journals and their peers but for consumption by the masses. And as a mother I can tell you talking at children doesn’t work and children are more likely to be inarticulate than adults. For instance I asked my very physical kindergarten daughter how she liked recess. She said she didn’t because “no one will ever play with me”. I spent a horrified night then made sure to walk by the school during recess to see what was going on. I stayed across the street and saw her in the middle of a group of girls sitting, talking and laughing on the playground. That evening I said so what do you do at recess and she said “I just sit there and talk and laugh with my friends but no one will play” So I had blown a random minor complaint out of proportion because she was not articulate. Don’t get caught up in that if you can help it.
Bes,
I was about to take my child of three on her first plane ride. We could see the planes flying overhead from our home. She looked up one day and asked me, “Do planes fall down from the sky?” With my heart in my mouth, I very carefully explained to her that it didn’t happen very often, and that she would be safe sitting next to me and her dad. She got a puzzled look on her face and said, “If they don’t fall down from the sky, how are we going to get on?”
I am not convinced that the hostile behavior among girls and between girls and boys is as much about competition as it is about a misconception as what it means to take care of oneself. They believe: there’s nothing that anyone can do that I cannot handle; don’t start with me, unless you’re prepared to get hurt; if you take from me or even try to, I’ll make you sorry you did.
Somewhere in the 80′s, the concept that women can do anything got twisted into women must do everything. That notion distorted the female sense of self worth and self confidence. Unless you were the smartest (but could hide it when necessary) and prettiest and most athletic and funny and social and and and…, you were less than a whole person. This has morphed into the “I take care of me” metality. In my opinion, the “must do it all” mantra resulted in the fatigue that has plagued feminisim. Living up to your fullest potential should never be met with a sense of disappointment or frustration that there is not more.
samanthasmom: That’s good! With their limited experience and vocabulary it can be hard to figure out what kids are talking about and especially in the teen years when formerly diligent children have bizarre brain function.
Media is a big problem for kids but the amount of media kids are exposed to varies with different factors like class. My kids have TV in the home but don’t really watch them because there is too much going on and they don’t have time. But poorer kids watch much more media and their parents work way to hard for a living and are not around as much to impose perspective on the media they watch right when the kids watch it. It is extremely important to reach out to these alone girls but they are also the girls who are furthest away from the class of women who make up most feminist orgs. So I would have contests in the new popular feminist mag as a way to start discussions and gain kid relevant content with cash prizes but not scholarships because so many kids don’t have a hope in hell of going to college. This could all start by asking moms to check their computers history to see what blogs and sites their teen girls visit regularly to see what content draws. I know “Twilight lexicon” and “Cullen boys anonymous” are big at my house currently. Also a free calculus tutoring site. compile this info. from 100 Moms and you have a good place to start for content.
Bes,
Your comments have been wonderful. Like you, I share an interest in reaching young girls. I feel like I lost so much time to a) patriarchal lies, and b) third wave “personal empowerment” feminism, and I want to afford young girls today the chance to skip some of those steps I had to go through. I want a short cut for them. There is no point in reinventing the wheel generation after generation, when there is so much work to build upon. And I agree that we need to reach out in an idiom they understand. This is a fundamental principle of poetry (which is one of my passions).
That said, I would put the smackdown on my daughter (she’s 15) if I caught her with Twilight in her internet history. Twilight is Mormon propaganda first, which is offensive enough to me, but it’s also profoundly anti-feminist. My girl would never hear the end of the sexism inherent in all vampire stories, and the dangers of subversive religious rhetoric. I didn’t know if you knew, so I thought I’d mention it.
Speaking of Twilight, I have to blame Violet for ruining my t.v. viewing experience last night. So conscious building has it been to follow your writing, that my sweet little detective show that I usually love to watch – I suddenly discovered last night that it was brewing with misogyny and patriarchal fantasies.
Really, thanks you Violet for your wonderful analysis on our culture. It has truly changed me.
Hi Anna Belle,
just wanted to comment on your statement “the sexism inherent in all vampire stories” – the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was very feminist in it’s own way, with a strong female character who both battles and gets personally involved with vampires and demons. It does run against the mainstream vampire theme, though, of women as helpless victims (some kind of rape fantasy, like the original Dracula was) or of seductive temptresses.
I read the first Twilight book out of curiosity (good to know what the “enemy” is thinking
and found the theme of “protection” to be repeated throughout – that the male vampire protagonist wanted to “protect” the female human protagonist, even from herself!
The whole idea of “protection” has always bothered me, but it was only recently that I realized that the sub-text of being protected is that you must *obey* the protector, how else is he going to be able to protect you??
So really, “protection” is just code word for obedience. Which explains why it has always bugged me!
agree totally with Kaija
Yea protection is a need that men create for women through violence. In order for which she must subordinate. So men have a vested interest in maintaining a dynamic of violence.
I think I take issue with the article focusing on the beliefs of young women and not delving into, for instance, the messages in the media, almost painting a picture of young women rejecting feminism, and not anti-feminist backlash. I think young women believe they are feminists but have been sold some internalized blame. I mean you have pseudo science being taught as fact, with all the weight of real science, that there are these natural differences in the sexes and it is women’s job to accept these natural differences. Once women accept the natural differences and embrace it the men will change. Young women are told they have to “understand” men and that this will stop the real problem of men’s violence. Self blame.
The backlash is real and expansive. I don’t think I’ve seen more pink toy aisles
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