Supposedly feminism is one of the most powerful movements of the second half of the twentieth century. One that has greatly improved women’s lives—both above and below the belt—while at the same time fundamentally changing the relationship between the sexes. Enjoying argument as I do, for some years now I have been toying with the idea of doing a book in which I would examine the validity of these claims. A topic, I thought, which would fit well with two of my previous books, i.e Men, Women and War (2001) and The Privileged Sex (2013).
Some weeks ago I was lucky to run into a volume titled The H Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness (2017). The author, Jill Fillipovic, is a New York based journalist and self-declared feminist. By her own statement, she had and has it all. 35 years old, white, upper middle class, good education (by training she is a lawyer), a career, “a nearly full passport,” delayed marriage, apparently no kids so far. Nor, since she considers the idea that motherhood is the most important job in the world a “platitude,” does it sound as if she is planning on having them any time soon; for which her unborn children can only say, thank God.
I quote.
“American women have gotten less happy over the past four decades… [It is] theorized that having to compete and perform in the workplace like men was making women depressed.”
“Nearly all American women—as many as 84 percent—report having been dissatisfied with their bodies at some point in their lives, and most says that dissatisfaction stems from wanting to be thinner. For most women, being thinner means sacrificing food and with it the pleasure that comes with eating. Or it means more hours at the gym, not because it feels good but because working our promises to make you skinnier. Maybe it means restrictive, tight undergarments to smooth out the wrinkles of human flesh or high heels, lengthen the legs and make one look slightly slimmer, even if they’re uncomfortable. It means part of being a woman is striving, wanting and sometimes hurting.”
“Just as feminists thought we were climbing steadily upward—an ascendance symbolized by a woman who seemed posed to finally break the presidential glass ceiling—we found ourselves collectively knocked down. It is a stinging reminder that for all the feminist moment’s renewed pop culture relevance, for all of the ways in which women’s lives are better than ever, there still has been no full vindication of the rights of women.”
“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” [attributed to Gloria Steinem].
“Today… it is still educated upper-middle class white women who are often selected to embody [feminism]… while women of color or trans women or poor women are pushed aside.”
“Culturally, ‘girly stuff’ is denigrated while men’s staff is elevated; fashion is shallow and women’s magazines are trashy, but sport are a valuable national pastime and men read Playboy and Esquire for award-winning journalism alongside photos of barely-clothed women. If parents give their daughter a traditionally male name, it’s cute, even cool and edgy, and if enough parents start giving girls what was once a boy’s name, the name first crosses over to being ‘gender neutral’ and eventually becomes simply female: Lesley, Ashley, Sydney, Taylor and Reese. But the opposite doesn’t happen: girls’ names almost never become boys’ names, and it is not cure to name your boy after a woman The same goes for clothing: ‘unisex clothes’ are traditionally men’s clothes that women also wear. Women have taken up wearing pans en masse, but most men do not wear skirts or dresses. Women can embrace guy stuff and it is a sign of clout and authority; men who embrace girl stuff are weak, less powerful, gay. And women, too, has to walk a tightrope between femininity and power; act too masculine and you’re an unlikeable bitch, but act too feminine—wear too much makeup or too much pink, talk ‘like a girl’ using upspeak or a high-pitched voice—and you won’t be taken seriously.”
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“For women whose hobbies are coded as male—video games, NASCAR—being the only girl can become isolating, and being ‘one of the guys’ can segue into becoming either visible or a sex object.”
“Although American pop culture is soaked in sex, our politics remain at best uncomfortable with and at worst actively hostile to female sexual pleasure. Nearly a century [sic] after its invention and after decades of wide usage by American women, the birth control pill remains a source of debate in Congress and even the Supreme Court. Abortion is a perennial election issue, opposition to it always listed in the Republican Party Platform The idea of poor women or the wrong kind of women having too much sex, or the strong kind of sex, has been used to justify cutting the social safety net, decreasing women’s access to reproductive health care, taking children away from their mothers, and sterilizing women without their consent.”
“The United States, and the world, remain vastly unequal places, marked by profound political, economic and social disparities between men and women. Much of it boils down to sex, and in particular how heterosexual men’s desires and experiences exist as standard, while women’s desires, experiences, and sexualities remain a kind of deviant from the norm, understood primarily in relation to men.”
“Cosmopolitan, by the ‘90s a decades-old bible for the single career, woman, careened straight into pleasure-your-man sex tips, each more ludicrous than the last.”
“It has not gotten any easier, or any less confusing, to be a girl in America.”
“Just 30 percent of speaking roles in the seven hundred biggest movies went to women between 2007 and 2014, and not a single woman over the age of forty-five had a lead part.”
“According to one study, straight women who have sex with a regular partner only orgasm about 63 percent of the time, while men orgasm 85perent of the time. Other studies have found even lower numbers, indicating that women orgasm less than 30 percent of the time… Young women routinely engage in sex they don’t find particularly pleasurable because they want to make their partners happy.”
Do I need to go on?