The most visible people in media debates aren't feminists because they're just that: media personalities, not activists.

Thinking about those we've lost lately, there's a lot to disagree with about both Andrea Dworkin and Betty Friedan. But reading them & looking at their work, what you realize is that they were true to their own visions and worked tirelessly on their behalf. Their ideas changed organically as any evolving human being's should, not in response to media trends. The more of us who follow this example, the better off, whether any one is recognized in the media as leaders or not.

for a while I thought I'd have the last word, and would therefore be forced to say something oh-so-clever about one of the more damaging flaws of feminism, its inability to tolerate dissent...

"but what do you mean? the feminist movement has always embraced diversity!"

Yes - but diversity is not dissent. diversity subsumes dissent by making every opinion equally valid without examination and renders dissent utterly toothless. diversity negates dissent.

I totally dig Roxanne Dunbar (and No More Fun and Games), and Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey changed my life - the idea that power in itself is neither good nor evil, neither masculine nor feminine...that was pretty powerful stuff.

I would further concede (possibly) that the publishing of The Feminine Mystique opened the door to more radical, more relevant and more ideologically "pure" works. but in order to be absolutely sure, I'd have to find in writing somewhere that Dunbar and Atkinson read TFM and said "oh wow! I'm totally radicalized! I'm gonna go set the world on fire! Thanks, Betty!"

I suppose this is possible. any thoughts?

What a name dropper you are! I haven't heard of "Ti-Grace" since my childhood and never of "Roxanne" so I had to google her. I'm glad to hear that radical marxist lesbian feminist theory is still around. I always thought of RMLFT as the shock troops of the feminist movement, like biblically-based christian fundamentalism, interesting to ponder but impossible to believe.

I made no claim to guess the level of happiness in individual women prior to, or after, the publishing of The Feminine Mystique in 1964.

I did say that the motives for the publishing of that work were not completely altruistic, and the publishing of that work may have done more harm than good to the general state of men and women in the US.

if you'd like to discuss that like a nice girl and not like a tantrum-throwing pottymouth, I'm up for that.

Friedanist feminism is not the same as:

the philosophy behind the Woman movement in the early part of the 20th century

or

the philosophy behind the women's strike in the ancient greek play Lysistrata

or

the philosophy behind Victoria Woodhull's run for president in the US in the 1880s

or any other evidence that women don't like to be excluded from the human condition.

but feminism as based on Friedan's work just doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. it's based on the experiences of a handful of white married women from a ridiculously exclusive girls' school who graduated in the early 40s, which was then generalized wildly out of context and indiscriminately disseminated to young women in the '60s and 70s, and then institutionalized and academicized in the 80s, and finally established as the de facto power structure in the 90s and the next millenium.

it's like those polynesian cargo cults, who extrapolated an entire theology from a crate of canned ham dropped out of the sky by an american plane during WW2.

Ti-Grace and Roxanne should be screaming blue murder by now.

You're still saying women were happier before the feminism of the 1960s. I'm still calling it a crock of shit.

do you speak to all women that way or just those whom you think are men?

your rudeness notwithstanding, I may have spoken imprecisely.

you are correct in saying that there was nothing new about the idea that women were not mere free-roaming sin generators, human eggwarmers and mop jockeys. I agree that the idea that women should not be excluded from the human condition is an old one, and a wise one.

I do however think that what we now refer to as "feminism" is a hijacked and perverted version of that wise idea, designed for the purpose of pimping books, magazines and other media, and making money off the desires of an unsuspecting population.

You've concocted the biggest crock of shit I've read all day -- and I work in the government!

Yeah, right, feminism didn't exist until 1963, women were happy being second-class citizens, feminism is just marketing. Keep telling yourself that as you jack off.

Please. Feminism has been around ever since the first time a woman looked at how she was treated versus how men were treated and thought, "Bullshit." The idea that women are human beings is still considered radical, but it's got a pretty long, impressive pedigree. Hell, feminism's pedigree is almost as long as misogyny's pedigree, and just a little bit longer than the pedigree of "feminism is just marketing; women are happy the way they are."

THen, you probably think slaves were happy and the Emancipation Proclamation ruined everything for everyone. Isn't the world so much nicer for you when everybody else knows their place?

It does seem like there is no one standing out from the pack as a young icon of feminism. You hear much more from the woment who are NOT feminist such as Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff-Summers, and Ann Coulter. This leads to the impression that there are not many young feminists and none active in leadership. However, there are plenty of young women involved in and redefining feminism on their terms. Jennifer Baumgarner comes to mind first for me. Her writing is interesting and when I've heard her interviewed she is funny, clear, and exactly the sort of voice we need. But the media does not seem to have noticed nor do they seem interested in presenting that picture.

feminism was, at the time of Friedan's most widely-disseminated work, largely a media construct, not a cogent, progressive and useful philosophy. consider that although The Feminine Mystique was written by a woman, the final approval for publishing it, and the money for backing it, and the publicity machine behind it, came from men.

but because the book generated a lot of controversy, and therefore a lot of press, which made money, which generated more press, which made more money, etc., people got the impression that her work was important. vitally important. the most important pressing issue of the day. the thing that all the educated, in-the-know, au-courant, avant-garde, relevant people were concerned with.

otherwise-more-or-less-content working-class women started to feel out of the loop, and wanted to identify with the bored and spoiled upper-class female college grads described in the book - nobody wants to feel backward and unfashionable, after all. they took what they could understand (barely) and discarded the rest.

so all of us now trying to figure out the future of feminism might as well be trying to determine the future of Middle Earth or Narnia, as feminism is equally ficticious.