Too good not to share: Paulina Porizkova’s op-ed in the New York Times about how America made her a feminist. Nearly as interesting as Porizkova’s sharp assessments of how women and sex are viewed in the different countries in which she’s lived and worked are the commenters who firmly believe that having been a model and thus having at times been photographed in little clothing automatically bars her from being able to sincerely believe in political, social, and legal equality for women/all genders.
We had this discussion in class last semester over the controversy about whether anyone can take Emma Watson seriously as a feminist because Vanity Fair printed some alluring photographs of her. There were some in my class who agreed that because we had seen skin, Watson was colluding in the relentless media objectification/sexualization of women and therefore could not be truthfully considered someone who disapproves of discrimination, violence against women, sexualization, i.e., a feminist.
My question was and is: who owns the woman’s body? The woman, or the people looking at her? Perhaps it’s a simplistic take on the situation, but that answer, to me, decides who can carry their feminist card, and who has to turn theirs in.
Meanwhile, here’s a book to put on pre-order: A Brief History of Feminism by Patu and Antje Schrupp, coming soon from MIT Press. If you read it, consider writing a review!
So one of those lost summers, when I picked up 
Camille Paglia captures all her best provocations, smoke bombs, and sturdy anti-establishmentarianism in this collection of essays, opening with excerpts from her hefty and admittedly groundbreaking 
The relentless self-satisfaction and feelings of superiority aside, Paglia’s intellectual endeavors of the past 27 years are full of striking common sense. Abortion, she declares, should be legal on the sheer fact of constitutional rights. She’ll concede pro-lifers the moral high ground, given their feelings about the sanctity of life, but she comes down staunchly libertarian on this political spectrum. Madonna, she noticed early on, is a “real” feminist: “She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny—all at the same time” (50).
Paglia gets less pleasure out of celebrating the things she does like, however, than she does out of bashing the things she hates. Paglia’s praise is warm but mild, but her glee when she holds the sledgehammer is glorious to behold. Most of the book is a strident and, by the end, well-rehearsed tirade against the same set of targets: mainstream Western feminism (“Infirmary Feminism”) and feminists, with their “moldy neuroses,” women’s studies centers, poststructuralist theory (oh, how Paglia loathes poststructuralism! she trots out her best insults on this rampage), and the Victorian coddling of college students over date rape.
Libertarian as she is, as noted, Paglia fails to see how a good dose of bucking up, showing some backbone, slinging insults, and—in the case of real women leaders, like female presidential candidates—maybe have a little military training can not immediately solve the problems women have created for themselves by being born into a world where men have invented technology, culture, government, sports, and fashion. Paglia might be more persuasive if she were more inclined to negotiate, consider all sides, explore, rethink, and potentially compromise—best seen in her lecture at MIT, when she howls with outrage over a presentation she had to sit through with a feminist scholar critiquing fashion photography. Beauty is all! Paglia says, not ever considering how a young and impressionable girl might be led to decades of hating and disfiguring her own body because she doesn’t live up to these highly managed and curated images. But Paglia is having too much fun to put down the sledgehammer, and besides, she hates sissies.
For another, Paglia’s critique of women’s studies programs and the way academic feminists train other academic feminists deserves some serious consideration. Her plea to inject some self-possession and some real common sense—and some basic knowledge of science, including biology—into mainstream feminism should be taken seriously, too. Last but not least, her prose, even when she’s at her most insulting, has a spare, lithe, powerful beauty. The book is simply fun to read, occasional howlers aside.
Depending on how you look at it, feminism has either become more acceptable and mainstream, or it continues to be perceived by most young women as a radical dogma that requires one to forego personal grooming and to revile men. Feminism is either strong, better, more pervasive than ever before, or it’s been hijacked into a marketing ploy that “liberates” young women by insisting they express themselves by the clothes, make-up, and accessories they buy and wear. Second-wave feminism is dead but third- and fourth-wave feminism are thriving. Wave feminism is archaic and waveless feminism is the thing. Feminism is a global cause or Western feminists have to be very careful about how they try to foist their imperialistic views on others. Feminists are still mainly white and ignorant of the battles of their less privileged sisters. Intersectionality is where it’s at. The future face of feminism is young, multi-colored, and somewhere outside the restrictive gender binary. Feminism is everywhere. Feminism is you.
Okay, that last one is easy. I think a rebuke is definitely called for in the last instance. Better yet, I will direct the privileged sister to read Dina Leygerman’s great blog post, 
This is a dense book aimed at fellow feminist historians, but it’s a huge contribution to the history of second-wave feminism in the United States, and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in how the wave got halted and the different camps, feminist vs. anti-feminist, so divisively bitter. Spruill begins with the dramatic assessment that the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977 was a dramatic watershed moment in the advance of women’s rights in the United States, and she spends the bulk of the book in a detailed inquiry of what led up to the conference, and what happened there, with the last segments devoted to a summation of what has happened for women’s rights in this country between then and now.
It takes some persuading to the see the NWC as a fundamental accomplishment, especially since Spruill, both times she talks about it–in the introductory chapter, and then in the middle chapters exploring the Houston event–spends at least as much time discussing the anti-feminist, anti-ERA rally taking place alongside, an event that seems to have been louder, better-attended, and even more self-congratulatory. For those curious about what the recent Women’s Marches following Trump’s inauguration have accomplished, this book is a good reminder that protests galvanize, provide solidarity, and develop loyalty among a group. It is also testament to the fact that, when you have two equally heated opinions that are dead-set against one another, nothing gets done beyond a lot of screaming, insult-launching, and exaggerated hyperbole.
This is best seen in the chapters devoted to the state conferences preceding the NWC, whose job it was to elect delegates to the national convention and determine a platform to submit. Here there is a tragic arc to the narrative as well. While legislative and popular support for the ERA in particular and the idea of women’s rights in particular was high in the initial stages, the conventions did what they were supposed to do: elect a diverse set of delegates and develop a platform that reflected a progressive agenda of full civil rights, including reproductive rights and non-discrimination, for the national platform that would eventually be submitted to the president. Once the anti-ERA forces got into action—the forces who passionately believed that the traditional family structure, with the woman at home dependent on the husband, were the only right model for everyone—the book becomes a wearying account of how, state by state, busloads of smug white evangelical women and their husbands descended on conventions, disrupted any fruitful discussion, congratulated themselves for being family champions, and then went back home to their safe, white houses.
Spruill doesn’t shy away from how the anti-forces deployed all sorts of others groups, including the KKK, to bulk out their protest numbers (an association Schafly always denied). In short, these chapters pound home the point learned from watching the U.S. Congress in action for the last six years: those who can make every effort available to obstruct an agenda that might mean more social justice for the broader population can usually manage to succeed. But the book also doesn’t shy away from showing the divisions within the feminist ranks—the arguments over how far to embrace LGBT rights, for example, and how to handle the abortion question—that led to factions and fissures there that generally left the middle-of-the-road feminists and the pro-life feminists with no place to go. As the more progressive voices won out, some of the middle who weren’t prepared to go that far get left behind—which is why the popular opinion still prevails among my students that feminists are strident, bra-burning, man-hating radicals, which means productive conversations about how to promote equal rights and just treatment for all genders get derailed quickly.
The major women on the scene emerge as courageous, charismatic, dedicated, impressive people, among them Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan (all pro-ERA), and Phyllis Schafly (anti). The story of how Schafly nearly single-handedly organized the resistance and halted such an enormously important piece of legislation as equal rights for all genders is awesome and—if you happen to be on the side of equal rights for women—a completely demoralizing example of how the shrill misuse of information and incitement of fear can stop any real dialogue and any positive change from happening (something we continue to see happening in the discussion on women’s rights up to this day). In this way, Spruill’s history is a revealing and explanatory account of just how the divisions between the progressives and the conservatives got so deep and the rhetoric got so heated to the point that there seems no middle ground remaining.
This Christmas I gave myself the best book I’ve ever or quite possibly will ever read.
Teresa LaBella
