by Eurydice (c) 1999

In Defense of  Postfeminism

(Pointing Fingers and How That Ruins Good Sex & Why I Am Not An Angry Girl)
 

    Gnaw on it for a moment, say it outloud:  feminists are misogynists.  It has a sort of crisp, chewy feel about it, like a ham sandwich with iceberg lettuce. Feminists are misogynists: their objection to the way women are portrayed in the media.  It has to do with stereotypes. In case you haven't noticed, the feminist contingent in our battery of critics commonly expound on how women are abused in the movies and TV, books and ads; depicted as sexy or motherly or weak or crazy, whatever, they're nothing but male fantasies.  You know, there aren't enough good "roles" for women.
     It's sort of a shit-tasting word, but pretty much I think we have to admit that many stereotypes come from somewhere, are not pulled by ears out of a trick hat.  They've gotten a particularly bad rap lately, but probably not all of it is deserved.  The basic problem with them is that there are very nasty and misguided people that have used and will continue to use them as a way to judge individuals; they see a group and not a person, judge a person by a group.  This is of course a bald-assed mistake, and it has led many of our tribe to shun the classifying of human beings at all, or at least to delineate between which classified groups are okay to pick on (those thought of as "in power") and those which aren't (groups with any claim at all to social weakness: one legged homosexual Innuits, for example; or people with bad teeth).
     However, the widespread misuse of stereotypes does not diminish the accuracy of many stereotypes in defining common characteristics of many, shall we say, groups?  Everyone knows all gays don't have ridiculously pumped bodies, Barbara Streisand fetishes and pretty much the same haircut.  Bankers don't all vote Republican, shake hands with Goethe's devil and ruin the Hamptons. Writers aren't all egomaniacal social misfits, bitter nerds still resentful from being losers in high school. 
     The feminists hate female stereotypes as we encounter them in all of the arts, or near-arts:  the goddess and the whore, the dumb sexpot, the bookish prude; the nurturing woman, the neurotic woman, the wife with two kids who stays home to cook and clean and bitch or have tired affairs; Mrs. Robinson, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, any woman in a Hemingway or Kundera book; the religious woman with a heap o' faith in a male god, the Virgin Mary, Madonna; the hat check girl, the coat check girl, the naked lady (unless she's naked with another lady and no men are present, those ones are okay) (unless it's a porn video, those ones aren't), the nude women in paintings who aren't looked at by men in paintings, the nude women in paintings at whom men stare, the women in advertisements who haven't gotten a decent acting job yet and so are forced for food and rent to stand there and sell...vodka, or something; the women in Playboy, the women in Cosmo; the evil bitch, the saintly friend, the mousy woman, the verbally-abusive woman; the leggy blonde, the busty brunette, Ginger, Marianne, and by now the list is endless. 
     Who the hell is left over?  That they (feminists) don't consider negative stereotypes, that they don't hate or hate the men who love them; that they don't, quite frankly, scoff at?  These types of woman, all, exist in real life.  I myself saw about forty of them in the grocery store just today, falling somewhere on the feminists' list of...what's wrong with the portrayal of women in America.  I think what's wrong with the portrayal of women in America (if you want to follow this train of thought) is that American women are portrayed.
     Feminists are misogynists, Part II:  How many times have you heard (and not just as a junior in college) woman complain when discussing certain female characteristics, that "men make us do it"?  Men make us wear short skirts and wonder bras, men make us eat or not eat, men make us become obsessed with exercise, want to bear children, stay home with the kids, they make us settle for a looks-based existence instead of, say, a money-based existence, etc.
     And I ask the level-headed reader among you:  is anything more "disempowering" (to use the lingo) than denying that women have their own free will?  Than portraying them as so weak that they can't and don't make these decisions on their own?   I'm guessing that if a young woman were to hear often enough the litany of "things men make us do," she might just start believing it; she might begin viewing herself as will-less, and she might react to this feeling of will-lessness by not eating, wearing wonder bras and trying to find a man to latch onto for strength.  To be shown that there are certain areas of society in which inequality exists for women is one thing; to be told again and again that you've been beaten down into the "second sex" just isn't going to help anybody with their egos.  One of the feminists' big themes seems to be a lack of trust in women to find a personal identity and to be in charge of it themselves.  Probably it all goes back to their sexy devoted neurotic mothers (say that outloud:  peanut butter and jelly?), and how their fathers made them be that way.
 

     P.S.  Whatever happened to Women's Libbers?  Women's Libbers were cool, they had something real to fight for. The only feminists who are cool any more are Postfeminists:
     Postfeminism differs from feminism and reacts to it. Neo-feminism is all-inclusive, not self-defensive, unparanoid, irreverent, exuberant, aberrant. It's the Art of Pleasure and Art of Life vs. the Celebration of Victimization (see the corruptive role of academia in the marginalization of the women's movement.)  The New Right and the New Left are both obsolete rational relics. Sadly, these days System and Presentation have replaced Content and Essence.  That insurmountable gap between sign and referent, between the thing itself and the word that refers to it, which Derrida and Co. pointed out first a long while back in theory and one could argue in part jest, has spread out like an oil spill and contaminated our communication to the extent that we believe life could be captured on a TV screen.  It's time to stop celebrating our victimhood, quit searching for handicaps to claim for ourselves and hide under, and celebrate the five senses.  We must create our life freely, out of sheer imagination, not fear.  Life is too wonderful to waste complaining and assigning guilt to foes and friends and parents, to stroll up and down memory lanes.  When you stay naive and mysterious you have better orgasms.  All this is why I am not an Angry Woman.
     There's no "popular" definition of postfeminism. It's not been on the cover of Newsweek yet. My "definition": postfeminism is our reaction to a couple of generations of feminists arguing amongst themselves about the definition of feminism, about nature vs. nurture, and bad men vs. bad patriarchy. We no longer care to pass the blame. We proclaim our womanhood, rejoice in it, and that's about it for a definition.  It's an open ballroom, among other metaphors.
     We P.F. women are no longer interested in special favors and Cosmo advice and sensitive men. We take our power and equality for granted and focus on the pleasures of being alive in the millennium. And yet postfeminism is in no way antifeminism.  It is the fruit of old-style feminism in many ways, it sprouts out of it, and however playfully it may treat its progenitors, it doesn't lose sight of history.  Gender is still an issue at large.  It's our choice and our freedom not to treat it as one. We know we're building history as we play on.
     Postfeminism doesn't "remove" people's/readers'/women's issues with their bodies, for instance, or their mothers or incestuous uncles or h.s. teachers: that would be atrocious, like a metaphoric nunnery; it simply "removes" the patriarchal p.o.v. presumed to stifle the erotic female body in all its morphs, hues and sizes and states of disrepair or harmony; the key is the rejoicing in being a woman of flesh and bone that can birth, bleed, diet, and orgasm.
     "Self-empowerment" is a term a bit touchy-feely for my taste, and certainly traditional feminists long and loudly advocated it too, so though of course post-feminism spreads the message of self-empowerment, I don't think that's what makes it distinct; what's new about our feminist agenda is that there is no agenda.  We don't hate pornography, we don't place value judgements on butch vs. lipstick lesbians, we unequivocally encourage radical bisexuals, dominatrixes, slaves and celibates to be themselves and join our ranks.  We don't apologize, don't analyze, we don't even much remember.
     The traditional woman, even the feminist, is the solid anchor and unmoving rock that allows humanity to do its thing, hunt, lust, conquer, go insane, knowing it will not be lost.  That woman is the safety net, the depository of common sense, the Catholic church, the guarantee of the longevity of the species—and in other contexts the apple of contention. That woman is what we rebel against, if we're of a mind to rebel. That woman can't "win."  Women's fiction hasn't yet quite overcome that womanhood, though women's theory (a safer realm, linguistically) has begun to.  Postfeminism is coming in to fill the gap.  To hunt, lust, conquer, go insane, not whine, without a safety net.
     In literature, postfeminism means prose that ecstatically and irrevocably resists the anemic conservatism of both left and right. Writing that's virile, unexpected, unsentimental, close to the preliterate intimacy (or even threat) that language becomes in the mouth of women.  Women always, in a way, speak in a foreign language. Postfeminist women don't want to be recognized, vilified, or approved of and assimilated; the moment we are, we know we're in effect silenced.
     It's  our postfeminist literary project to reclaim and unleash the body; to shed from it the stereotypical metaphors the discourse has cloaked it with and the shame that the West has been piling up on it for two millennia. The body is usually outside the realm of language; it's been traditionally women's realm; so it's a good way for women to make language their own—by language I also mean power. We don't fear we'll be burned at the stake, even though we may be; we don't feel rebellious but natural and normal, and that's what post-feminism is about.
     (Old divinities are making a comeback, gods of carnal lust or mystical silence, but it took centuries for the Inquisition to numb the West and it's taking long to reawaken it.)
     Postfeminist women are free of romantic shackles, for love's discourse is used to control women, and romanticized heroines have been done to perfection. Postfem women's difference exempts them from all stiff rules of conduct. America is well-suited to difference—that's its curse and its freedom. We have no nurturing martyrs nor women with flag and cause.
     As a postmodernist feminist,. I suffer from a severe distaste for mimesis, the familiar, the reassuring, the domestic, and nurse a hunger for the unexpected, the unrecognizably disturbing.  My commitment to myth is absolute, because there lies the only power of cultural creation.  When words magically transform into worlds, language is working, brewing. I think that's possible only when the text creates its own universe with its time, genealogy, rules & rebellions—against the natural impulses of the English language which is a macho business language, efficient, reserved, and to the point.
     I understand riot grrl tactics: I ignore conventional time both in my text and in my daily life, to the surprise of many locals; I value my own cycles above any compromise. I prefer living in myth, who doesn't? I like transcending.  I like languages that border on the incomprehensible, such as medical or religious language, etc., the cacophony of simultaneous languages and ethnicities competing with each other in the big ghetto that's America—this polymorphous multimedia multilingual rotting pot.
     And because America doesn't claim a past but only a future, because in America words are lightweight, and because America possesses no memory (its one saving grace), so long as I live here I'm not apt to mistake the voices of dead great men, ancestors or heroes, as my own. Only women's words can pass on the memories of the body and create a world that allows the fullness of being human. And although I'm writing this in the first person, I don't refer by that to myself in any unique way,  but rather to an inclusive feminine adventurous "I", unwilling to be the token exotica or the token minority, chaotic, wide open—this abundant (im)balance of opposites that are the women of 2000.
     Women are not a fixed category. So there're no fixed categories in postfeminism. We're making ourselves up as we grow. So mote it be.