MBFB PT. 2

What I find myself still thinking about from yesterday: A NY TIMES interview with the co-founder of *Bitch* Magazine, Andi Zeisler. I read this interview over coffee Sunday morning and found one comment/question Deborah Solomon raised rather intriguing: "It seems as if its original vision of social equality has been undermined by third-wave feminists like yourself, who limit your critiques to, say, Tori Spelling's breasts. Doesn't the obsession with popular culture risk trivializing feminism?" Ok, if I were Zeisler, I would have probably been very pissed off by this question and come back with a witty, smart defense of my magazine and its focus . . .however, this is not what actually happened. Instead, Zeisler responds: "Many young women today have more day-to-day contact with "Desperate Housewives" than with the radical feminist writings of Germaine Greer or Shulamith Firestone." And, now, this morning I awake to several blogs discussing how stupid Solomon was/is, how kind Zeisler was, how young feminists are completely misunderstood by the older ranks, yadda, yadda, yadda. I do believe Solomon was attempting to hit upon something other feminists (young and old) have been discussing: the focus of the third wave. When I was still in grad school an excellent piece emerged about the Third Wave's lack of social critique--and it's endless celebration of individual acts of resistance, girl power, so to speak. I do think popular culture is important if it is constantly grounded/reflective of the consumerist culture in which we live. Maybe the fact that young women today are more cognizant of Desperate Housewives than the writings of Firestone and other feminist thinkers IS indicative of a problem--and one that needs to be addressed. I support the third wave and think some of the blogs out there are fascinating. However, I, too, find some of the analysis lacking or base at best. For example, I don't think we should celebrate the first time US women entered the Navy. Ew. Rather than an accomplishment, we should seriously wonder why a social movement supposedly against militarism, violence in all of its forms, would want to enter the ranks of the enemy. Sorry folks, that aint girl power to me, much less progress. And, for all the talk of eroding abrotion rights, let's frame the debate in broader terms: reproductive health care for all women. Low-income women, historically, have been coereced into pregnancy OR coerced into sterilization programs (ie the famous case of the Relf sisters). Now that Roe v. Wade is teetering on the brink of obsolescene, everyone is having a march on Washington or somewhere. I certainly don't want to see Roe V. Wade overturned, but I'm tired of the single-issue, personal narrative, D-I-Y approach to feminism that has come to characterize our present-day. We must connect the dots . . .and just talking about the intersections or the holy trinity of race, class, gender/sexuality doesn't mean you actually have an ANALYSIS that coherently connects the dots between these competing categories of oppression. Instead of celebrating/wearing t-shirts that proudly claim: "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" we need to get our collective shit together and think about why the feminist movement, at least in the US, has not made much of an impact on areas like foreign policy . . . at a time when we need to quit thinking about vibrators, dildos, and breasts (all fine things to talk about in their proper context) and refocus our attention on the massive amount of women being displaced/killed by our corrosive, destructive, foreign policy decisions AROUND the globe--not *just* in the current war du jour. But I digress. A friend of ours bought a subscription to *Bitch* and I enjoyed reading it for the most part. I'm just tired of the knee-jerk reaction of the the so-called Third Wave against the so-called Second Wave (read old, outdated, un-hip, etc). Read the blogs this morning . . . you'll see what I mean.

Things to do today: Quit surfing web. Work on paper. Go to library. Walk dog. Eat.

What I'd like to be doing: Drinking bloody mary's at a dive bar/seafood establishment somewhere warm with a cool breeze . . . perhaps Key West?