Scraps: Breaking Waves

I've been reading Rebecca Traister's excellent book about women voters and the 2008 presidential election, Big Girls Don't Cry. Much of the antipathy I felt towards the media, especially the home team -- the "good, liberal media" --- being a closet Clinton supporter was validated.

At the time, I was writing for a pretty big deal women's blog. Although I was a lowly entertainment reporter, and not one to get involved in any of the online shitstorms, I could sense the divide in the feminist blogosphere. As I edge closer to forty, I guess I'm on the elder end of third-wave feminism. A woman just graduating college is almost (biologically speaking, literally) young enough to be my daughter. She's coming into "her feminism." I can't speak for other women my age, but I think beginning to understand the rift between second and third wave feminism twenty years ago. This really hit home:

"What was often hard for older women to remember was that younger women creating a new feminist realm had not the same experiences they had, both in broad poetic post second wave terms and also purely in terms of age."

I see that happening now, too, in the feminist blogosphere, where it's easy to feel irrelevant and left out as each year the commentariat gets younger and younger and you're one of few over 35. I rarely comment these days anyway, and I have to keep reminding myself that it's the natural progression of things, and at twenty, I sure as hell didn't want to listen to a forty-year-old. (My mother will concur.) What I do isI worry that we're going to be as out-of-touch as we used to accuse the second-wavers, our mothers, of being.