“The past few months have been like an extended consciousness-raising session” – Amanda Fortini
This quote from this week’s New York Magazine’s article titled “The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the fourth wave” iterated a feeling that I have been having since my friends burst into my room and asked me to do this chick lit special topics with them at the beginning of the semester. Two of these girls stated to me just a few weeks earlier that they defiantly were “not feminists”. But recently, they seem to have come around – as one sloganeer put it, you’ve come a long way baby.
It’s not that they weren’t feminists,
it’s just that they didn’t need to be, that they didn’t realize what it entailed and that the structure of their whole lives was based on the idea that they were just as good as their male counterparts, if not better, and that they deserved as much choice, if not more, than their male counterparts. Amanda Fortini, the author of this article, claims that the Hillary Clinton run for president has resparked this burn-the-bra urge in American females who missed the second wave. As for my friends, I think maybe that the fact that these feelings started creeping up has more to do with the fact that we are about to graduate. We are about to enter the working world where everything is not 50-50 men/women the way it is in college that my friends and the young female population in general is coming around to the word feminism.
Still, It is nice for once that “legitimate” news sources are actually covering a woman for something other than flashing her vagina or for getting attacked by fellow soldiers (see my other blog). And although I am extremely skeptical of the news, I admit it has a strong affect on our psychologies. By showing images of a woman in a serious role the media, probably unwittingly, has made it ok for us to talk about women as serious people, not just in Victorian terms as victims or nymphomaniacs. Unlike the women of Lipstick Jungle who are successful professionals in their own right but who are too sexualized to be taken seriously, Hillary Clinton exudes seriousness and sexiness doesn’t get in her way. But I digress..
There is a feeling of strength that has resulted, I think, from this resurgent sisterhood. Sitting around talking about a recent scandal at school involving drag, misogyny and robot wars one of us remarked that this was an interesting discussion because we were all smart and had different opinions on the matter, and indeed the feeling in the room seemed to be tending toward the revolutionary. Fortini says of this new sisterhood, “it’s exciting”. It reminds me of the confidence, pride and swagger that comes when you play for a team, and I am sure the men of our school probably felt this fervor in the glory days of Frat hood or Freemasonry.
Freedom for women in the western world seems to be something that requires constant maintenance and care. Fury for the cause seems to surge at moments of important political change i.e. Abolition, Vietnam, and then once gains are made it goes dormant again. These dormant periods, such as one we just experienced, seem to be the toughest to go through, because the struggle of every day life turns inward and a woman cannot talk about sexism without receiving the wrath of her male and female counterparts. Perhaps this is a cycle we have to accept, but it feels nice for now to have the conversation out in the open, shared feelings voiced and a sense of collectivity palpable.
