Does feminism have a problem with science?

It's more than a few years old, but still a pretty good read:

Science is not the enemy; the practise of science is a productive method for understanding ourselves and our world. When some scientific studies overgeneralize and/or neglect certain groups of people, the problem is bad science, not science. 

One of the serious problems with the lack of diversity in the practise within certain knowledge domains is that some important aspects of reality are not even considered, leading the researchers to overgeneralize and draw incorrect conclusions. This problem comes from the fact that scientific practise is a social activity, subject to the biases and prejudices of the scientists. In contrast, the scientific methods of gathering empirical data to refute hypotheses, and using statistical methods to determine statistical significance, are perfectly sound. (geekfeminism.org)

I don't think that feminist blog world, of feminism in general, is anti-science in any conscious sort of way, but most sites could use a science blogger, or, at least, someone skilled in interpreting data if they're going to be reporting studies.

Are You a Bad Feminist?

Buzzfeed's quizzes are usually pretty light and silly.

All right, so this one isn't any different.

"You checked off 18 out of 56 on this list!
You are a borderline acceptable feminist – or, as some would say, 'problematic'."

I'm a borderline acceptable feminist, which means I'm perfectly average.

I'm a little surprised that some of the commenters took this to be a serious assessment of feminism. Most of the statements listed are old anti-feminist tropes: one can't be a "proper" feminist and wear makeup, sport hairless legs or armpits, or read Cosmo. (Note: I have no idea what Closer is. I'm assuming it's not the Dennis Cooper book.)

Where, apparently, do I lose my feminist cred? I own more makeup than Le Tigre albums, I like Miley Cyrus (or I did before all that cultural appropriation), and I thought How To Be a Woman was garbage. Though I don't see how that's one for the negative column.

Outrage Ennui

I could probably come up with a few reasons why the feminist blog world at large appears to be dying a slow and painful death. These things are cyclical. Blogs come and go and the apathy that comes from posting every day, particularly posting without the promise of reward or fulfillment, is a given once you've been in the game for a while. But I think this is different, and I'm not the only one . Is the Feminist/SJ blogophere finally starting to eat itself?

Between outrage fatigue and ignoring large parts of its audience, I think a lot of readers have had it if site like these are any indication. So what needs to change? Better moderating for one. We've reached a point where the fear of being accused of "policing someone's anger" means a lot of combative behavior slips by uncorrected. And the long-running complaint of the lack of diversity in the "Big F" feminist sites still stands.

Universal Messages

This is the next in, I guess, what's turned out to be a series of posts about the myth of some sort of universal experience. For the past couple years, I've been trying to parse my own fractured relationship to feminism, so I'm drawing on my past for this. This is one example.

A while ago, Jezebel posted about the lack of women in STEM fields and someone commented on how it goes back to girls being dissuaded from math and science because...

"Girls can't do math"

I'm sure I heard this growing up. I know I did. But in addition to that message, I also got one that said that said people like you (poor, working-class) don't go to college, so why bother being good at math (or anything else)? I got this from multiple sources, by the way -- family, friends, school counselors especially. (Yep. The guidance counselor -- the one who's supposed to, you know, guide me, basically told me I wouldn't amount to much.) Because I was routinely made to believe that I wasn't smart, I did well in school to prove otherwise. The "girls can't do math" message was pushed to the bottom. If I wanted to prove that I wasn't some uneducated hick, I had to ignore it or write it off as BS. I was good enough at math to advance to a fourth-fifth grade class as a third-grader, so I guess I did that.

(I should note that all my math and science teachers in grade school were women. This was also a big part of dispelling the message that girls don't do math.)

And then in jr. high someone got the brilliant idea to teach "new math" leaving everyone unprepared for high school algebra*, but the point I'm trying to make is that the "universal experience" of being expected to be bad at math and science gets a little muddy for me, even though I know the reality for a lot of girls is that they are dissuaded from math and science. But discussing it in a feminist context means my experience doesn't fit into a nice, neat little box -- and I hardly think I'm a special snowflake. Gendered experiences, for me, are also classed, but since feminism does a piss poor job of addressing classism (among other things, but this is the "ism" I'm most qualified to talk about), I don't think my voice is needed or wanted. And that's... okay. I don't mean that to sound flip, because I think feminism does a pretty good job, provided you are a straight, white, cis, able-bodied, middle-class woman. It fails -- grandly at times -- when you're not all those things. It's repeated so often, it sounds like a mantra, but it's palpably true.

* This isn't always the case, but I think the teachers who decided that our class was going to be the new math guinea pig were ill-prepared to teach it themselves. 

One more thing about sex positivism

And it will probably be my last, as the whole topic is pretty polarizing.

I know this post from The Pervocracy has been linked before, in particular on a contentious piece on Feminitse, but I think it's one of the better ones I've found elucidating sex-positive feminism in simple, non-judgmental terms. Right away, this stood out:

"If you treat sexy women with disgust and pity, you're not protecting their rights; you're just gleefully participating in their public humiliation. (You're also often attacking them on a subject that's highly intertwined with culture, class, age, and even body shape. Not everyone who looks "sexy" to you is doing it on purpose, much less doing it to serve the patriarchy.)" (emphasis mine)

I bolded that last part because for a movement that at least gives lip service to intersectionality, there's very little intersectionality in practice. A big part of why I've become apathetic to feminism lately is that I can't always pretend to be on the same page as someone whose experiences differ wildly from mine, and while it's certainly true that the feminist blog world is varied, the public face of contemporary feminism -- the ones granted guest appearances on MSNBC and the like -- is straight, white, cis, and middle-class.

This reminds me of something Julia Serano said in her book, Excluded:

"... diversity is something that is routinely touted, albeit only within certain parameters. Usually, when people talk about 'striving for diversity,' they are rather specifically talking about displaying a mix of people of different races, ethnicities, religions, classes, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and/or abilities. In other words, these the handful of different traits that 'count' toward imparting diversity onto an organization or movement... what concerns me is that these are not the only traits that exist."

Not only are those not the only traits that make up how one experiences the world, they overlapp, influence each other, and become muddied. For example I know how people with class privilege think and act because it's presented as the dominant or "correct" experience, and since classism is the "ism" I'm most microtuned to notice, everything else I do is filtered through it. Gender roles, for example, are always "classed" to me. Pink and lace say girly, sure, but for me they also say (relatively speaking) money. I don't know if the reason I don't like "girl stuff" is because of some innate trait in me that says "Pink? No thank you," that I didn't have a lot of girly things growing up because they were expensive and I've since trained myself not to want them, or the feminist catchall, internalized misogyny.*

How does all this factor into sex positive feminism then? It's often presented as sexy straight girls who like a lot of PIV sex. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and sexy straight girls who like PIV sex shouldn't be shamed for it, but it's an incredibly naive stance to take, particularly when a lot of sex-poz thought comes from queer theorists like Patrick Califia and Carol Queen. It's unfortunate that it's gotten somewhat of a tarnished reputation (pun intended), because there is a lot of good there once you get past some of the stereotypes.

*I would never deny that internalized misogyny is a thing, but it's often over-simplified.

What kind of feminist are you?

I found this interesting quiz via amptoons  yesterday. According to the introduction, "The Feminist Perspectives Scale developed by Nancy M. Henley et. al. in 1998 measures five types of feminism that have typically been distinguished from one and other in the study of feminism in the United States, as well as a generic anti-feminism. The scales of the FPS are liberal feminism, radical feminism, socialist feminism, cultural feminism, womanism/WOC, and conservatism." My results:

Women of Color Feminism: 48
Liberal Feminism: 45
Socialist Feminism: 35
Radical Feminism: 30
Cultural Feminism: 17
Conservative: 10 (Which is basically means I have zero conservative values. The scale runs from 10-49.)

I agree with a lot of the commenters on Alas: trans* feminism was entirely absent, some of the questions were worded awkwardly, and overall it's a fairly dated assessment of feminist ideology, but these results don't really surprise me. Liberal feminism, I guess, represents anyone working within a contemporary feminist framework, though it's not entirely without its failures. WOC at the top makes sense, because I came to feminism via women like Angela Davis and Alice Walker, who also better address the intersections of other identities. (Though as a white person, I could never claim womanism for my own.) I'm not a capitalist, so that was reflected in some of my answers also.

I wish queer theory/queer feminism was included, though. And if trans* issues had been addressed, I would have probably scored lower on the radical feminism scale. Not that anyone should put much stake in an online quiz, but I'd like to see what an updated version of this would look like.

Mars vs Venus vs Something Else Entirely

I don't take an entirely constructivist, nor an entirely essentialist view of gender. It's far too multifaceted to be limited to just nature or just nurture explanations. (Read Julia Serano's Whipping Girl -- she breaks it down far better than I can.) That being said, whenever someone comes forth and makes the dubious claim that there are "male" brains and "female" brains (with the female brain usually being the defective version), I roll my eyes hard.

I largely agree with Samantha Eyler's post, and while I'm glad that the notion that there are more differences among men and women than there are between them is being accepted as the de-facto school of thought (at least in the feminist blog world), universalizing the experience of "girlhood" remains one of my pet peeves.

As a woman told for her entire childhood that her dreams of becoming an astronaut, a doctor, or a Senator would always be impossible because that was not what God intended for her as a girl, I can attest to the damage wreaked on my soul (yes, I did just use that loaded word: soul). I actually started to believe my intellect would always be told where it could and couldn’t go, that my life’s course was not my own to decide.

I know this isn't what she's intending to do here, but when I read that, I thought to myself "hmm. I never once entertained the idea that I couldn't do something because I was a girl; however, I know that that becoming an astronaut, a doctor, or a Senator was entirely out of reach because I was poor." What do you do when you can't parse every aspect of your life through a solely feminist lens? Don't, I guess, but there's little room in feminist discourse when it comes to the intersections race and class.

Eyler's is the kind of article that will probably get quite a bit of attention among feminist bloggers as it rightfully should, but the hyper-focus on gender alone means that a lot of people are going to be left out of the discussion.

Why I am a sex positive feminist (and why I sometimes find that a problem)

With some reluctance, I admit it: I am a sex-positive feminist. And since I'm being honest, I hate the word "sex positive feminist." It's mistakenly become shorthand for "lots of sex, no judgement," but I don't think sex needs to be parsed through a feminist lens all the time. It would be easy for me to say that what happens between consenting adults is none of my business -- because it isn't -- but there are a lot of valid criticism of sex positive feminism, particularly when you get into the dangerous business of universalizing experiences.

This discussion that broke out in Feministe's open thread this week is a really good starting point for some of the pros and cons of sex positive feminism. EG's comment was particularly eye-opening because I realized my experience was nearly the polar opposite of hers.

I spent my most of adolescence during the ass-end of the 80s at the height of Reagan/Bush conservatism and AIDS panic. I went to catholic schools in the US heartland. I didn't hear one single positive message about sex. Sex was for marriage only and for making babies. Sex was always PIV and straight. It wasn't really enjoyable for girls, and it could possibly kill you. My parents are pretty tolerant, liberal people, but ones who worked hard and came home physically tired. Long discussions about sex weren't really on the table. Plus I was a secretive kid who didn't ask a lot of questions to begin with.

So in a way, I'm the perfect beneficiary of sex positive feminism. But not everyone is, and it's good when those who have an issue with some of its tropes speak up. I've written about this before, but I'm not at all comfortable with Slutwalks and reclaiming the word "slut." Slut to me signifies not only a woman who is unabashedly sexual, but one of a certain class. (I somewhat flippantly said that it's easy to reclaim the word slut when you have a PhD.) I know it's wrong, wrapped up in layers internalized classism that I will possibly never peel through, but I just can't "reclaim" that word. I wouldn't want someone to tell me I must or else cash in my feminist cred right now, so I feel the same way about the criticisms of sex poz feminism. Theory is no stand-in for real lives.

In more "I'm not a feminist, but..." news

Michelle Dean from Flavorwire has a good article about Kelly Clarkson and the "are you a feminist?" question that gets asked of nearly every female celebrity. Dean says:

I think it’s far more damaging to “feminism” to have celebrities air their unintelligent views of what “feminism” is, than it would be to simply not ask them this question. I am, paradoxically, one of those feminists on the Internet who of late finds herself not so very attached to the word “feminist” as I am to attracting women to an intelligent conversation about what exactly it means to be a full participant in the world as a woman. And it seems that the label feminist, for reasons of dumb cultural messaging, is not the place to do that.

This is a good starting, point, though I would love it if a celebrity with some mainstream appeal actually critiqued feminism history of exclusion rather than resorting to tired, old tropes.

More on the "universal girlhood" myth

Here are two more links that debunk the idea of a universal "female socialization" -- a tactic TERF'S often used to discredit and exclude trans women from feminist spaces -- but speak to all kinds of intersecting identities:

It’s evident that at least for many trans women, internalization of a male identity is rejected entirely, and to insist that these women experienced something so wholly apart from female socialization that they cannot possibly understand the experiences of other women is to hold her to a ludicrously strict standard of how she was supposed to have experienced female socialization, a standard that a great many cis women themselves would not meet. Are you to say that all cis women internalized the prescriptive cultural messages of the female gender role? Because if not (the only realistic position), there’s no way you can exclude such a trans woman from your clubhouse on these grounds without also excluding any cis woman who managed to dodge the bullet of fully-internalized female socialization. -- Natalie Reed

Now, there’s so many issues and problems with “female socialisation”. It comes from the belief that all women have the same socialisation, which, if a group claims to be intersectional in their approach, is nonsense. A white woman does not have the same “female socialisation” as a black woman. There is not one shared experience that we all digest and thus result in the same perspective. Not to mention, internalised misogyny is a thing. If “female socialisation” gave anyone who identifies as a woman insight into anything, than wouldn’t pro-life women not exist? Wouldn’t women who firmly believe that they belong in the kitchen and men belong in all positions of power not exist? Of course not. -- Boldy Go

I received a mix of typical "girl" and "boy" messages growing (fear strange men = girl; don't cry= boy), plus a lot of other ones that have nothing to do with gender, so I think discussions like these are invaluable. (One that sticks out in particular is a working-class distrust of authority bred by a lack of agency. One reason I don't "fit in" within the feminist blog world is that most of them have an implicit trust of authority figures - doctors, police, etc. That surprised at first, until I realized that the loudest voices are also the most privileged. Those institutions work for them, therefore, they have no reason not to trust them.)

Jezebel linked to my blog, and I can't help but think I should apologize for it.

Last week, Jezebel linked to this post I wrote a few years ago, much to my embarrassment. Most of what I wrote still stands, but I neglected to acknowledge that there are myriad ways women refuse the feminist label, and not all of them are "'cause men don't find it sexy." Feminism has historically failed to address the needs of trans* women, women of color, working-class women of all races, and disabled women. These are legitimate gripes, ones I have voiced myself in the four years since I wrote that post, and ones I would like to see more often in mainstream discussion about feminism. The problem happens when famous default to the trope that feminists hate men.

Growing up, I never received the message that feminism was something shameful. It was something you were supposed to be, like anti-racist or anti-homophobic. The truth is, I don't know if even I consider myself a feminist anymore, taking into consideration its failure to learn from its own recent history. And that makes me feel like a huge hypocrite, especially when someone links to an old post of mine that was all "yay feminism!" and very little critique.

I keep those old posts up as a way to check myself. To see how far I've come, no matter how embarrassing they are.

Pink

It's more than two-years old, but digging around on the internet for something else, I found this great discussion from Shakesville on policing femininity... but I have a few reservations.

While I certainly don't doubt the existence of internalized misogyny, it makes me uncomfortable to see it trotted out as the primary reason for rejecting anything marked feminine. (Not to mention that it's been used by radfems to delegitimatize trans* men and genderqueer people.) That's not what Liss is implying here, but it's such a simple explanation, I can see why it's popular among contemporary feminists. There's a difference between "I don't like" and "no one should like" that gets a little lost, though. Another thing I never see mentioned in the feminist blog world is that certain expressions of femininity are classed. Growing up a working-class kid, a lot things marked as feminine were also marked as "rich" to me. Even if I wanted it, I didn't have access to it. Class privilege is big part of things marked feminine and the safety required to perform them.

Fandom and Feminism

Between my usual blogging apathy, and the plumbing issues that took over a week to completely repair (fingers crossed), it's been crickets around here save for a couple random videos. (YouTube is my savior.) A lot of the apathy comes from trying to figure out where I fit in the feminist blogworld, if at all.

I've been hunting down a few articles that talk about feminism from different viewpoints, not only on the race/class/sexuality axes, where feminism still falls woefully short, but the POVs of other feminists who feel shut out by the mainstream. I'm not a geek (at best I could call myself geek-adjacent), but I've been involved in a lot of fan-type circles, but this post from Geek Feminism really speaks to me.

Feminism needs "bitchy little fights"

I found this recent Neko Case interview via Jezebel. I'm happy when any entertainer demonstrates even a modicum of feminist knowledge, but the quote in question makes me cringe:

"Tell them that our momentum is huge. Keep it going. Don't stop here and fight about why you're calling yourself a feminist or not. Don't get into these bitchy little fights about who does what, where. Because the women who marched and fought so we could vote, they didn't do it so we could sit around bickering about what we called ourselves. Move. Forward. Move forward. Decide you're equal. Don't take anything less. And don't stop."

Just once I'd like to see a famous someone acknowledge that many women don't call themselves for very valid reasons. Gendered slur aside, "bitchy" little fights foster discussion.

I'm going to guess she's referring to the feminist hierarchy -- that's there's some sort of perfect feminism and everything else isn't. And I agree with this: no one should prop their feminism up as better than or "correct." But she fails to mention that feminism has failed a lot of women, and they're the ones often told to "stop bickering."

Feminism's Problem with Race, Part Two

I've been following the (now three ) threads on Feminist regarding the recent #solitaryforwhitewomen tag, and I highly suggest all white feminists do the same, even those who aren't active commenters on Feministe.

I criticize Feministe a lot, not because I don't like the site or Jill, but because I do. Because there is immense potential there, and I always end up disappointed. Though I will say that it isn't Feministe alone, but something more symptomatic of liberal and progressive spaces overall -- the sense that racism (as well as transphobia, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia) can't exist here because we're good liberals; we've unpacked all our privileges.

Lauren, who started Feministe back in the early 2000s, left a lengthy comment  apologizing for her exclusion of WOC (as well as others who don't fit the straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class template),  and her involvement with HS, which is admirable, but incomplete. She says:

I would have liked to see during the “Full Frontal/Jungle” fight was some feminist bloggers writing explicit guides to up and coming writers — particularly non-traditional writers, say, who hadn’t gone to college or who were home with children or who lacked some of the illustrious friendships, resumes, and connections that would serve as a professional stepping stool — about how to break into the publishing world, write a book proposal, shop for and secure an agent, create a portfolio, create professional social media presences, submit to brick and mortar publishing institutions, and make this process more open and transparent for all instead of guarding trade secrets.

I don't think this is a bad per se -- it's good to share resources --  but it still trades in the idea that feminism is capitalism. Maybe I'm just a hippy socialist, but it seems disingenuous. And the "we need to help them because obviously they can't help themselves" talk is pretty othering.

On a personal note, I'm trying to make an effort to be more vocal in the actual community rather than from the relative safety of my own blog. I see too much happening and say nothing, in part because I feel alienated by feminism, too, but that doesn't make it any less hypocritical.

Starter Feminism

I found this five-year-old Feminist post linked on Are Women Human.  It's a good reference point, I think, for some of the problems within the feminist blogosphere, especially for those new to it. (I didn't know Feministe existed in 2007, so the thread is definitely new to me.) I don't agree with Jill's assessment that a lot of the criticisms of Jessica Valenti's book, Full Frontal Feminism, are off-base (some of them are quite valid -- more about that later), but I think she makes an interesting point here:

"Do I want people to be reading Angela Davis and Catherine MacKinnon and Helene Cixous and bell hooks and Judith Butler? Absolutely. But none of the previously mentioned are particularly good starting points. And we’ve gotta start somewhere. That’s what Jessica’s book offers — a gateway into feminism, a starting point for the unfamiliar, a way to make feminism accessible and relevant to women who otherwise would be turned off by it. And she does a phenomenal job."

As someone who came to feminism, at least in part, through "pop feminism, namely Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and Susan Faludi's Backlash, I'm all for an easily digestible version of it, but I don't think that we should dissuade someone from jumping headfirst into Helene Cixous or Judith Butler. (The problem with the latter isn't just that she's dry and academic, although Judith Butler is those things, it's that she's not a particularly engaging writer.) bell hooks's Feminism is For Everybody I would absolutely recommend as an introduction to feminism. My issue with Full Frontal Feminism (and yes, I have read it), as a sort of Fem 101 text is that it's not a very good one, at least if you want to promote feminism as inclusive to more than just white, cis-and-heterosexual, college-bound young women. Valenti's book may pay lip service to WOC, or queer or working-class women, but it's not the same as having those women writing books or blogs. And it's telling who gets the book deals, and the guest spots on MSNBC and who doesn't.

So here's your question: what book would you recommend to someone just discovering feminism?

Caitlin Moran Apologizes For Slurs

I think this was important to note: Caitlin Moran, author of How To Be a Woman, apologized via Twitter for her use of homophobic and ableist slurs. I'm not sure if this is a case of "too little, too late." I actually like her, and I think she's funny, but I can't recommend her books, even as an introduction to feminism.There's no excuse for using the "T" and "R" words, even if they're left over from your childhood, or you learned them from drag queens. (I think she has a point that the "t-word" has a slightly different connotation within the drag world; however, that doesn't mean it's not still a slur.) it If she thinks that's it's the only reason for the push-back on her Twittersilence campaign, she's wrong. Ana Mardoll has written a great post on why having a Twitter abuse button isn't a one-step solution, and it can further silence those whose voices are seldom heard as part of Big Feminism.

"However, the solution proposed to this situation by a lot of high-profile feminists with, it must be pointed out, a lot of relative privilege (including in many cases, but not limited to: cis privilege, white privilege, class privilege, urban privilege, thin privilege, religious privilege, and straight privilege) was to not demand that Twitter revise its terms of service to disallow rape- and death- threats and then proactively respond to tweets reported to the help team via email, as well as possibly making a special class of closely-monitored accounts for protection (much as Twitter already maintains "Verified" accounts for celebrities and political figures) where Twitter could proactively locate, remove, and ban rape-threats from frequently targeted accounts whose owners request this service."

Mardoll also points out the ludicrous idea of putting Twitter behind a pay wall, which could leave out a lot of people who can't afford the fee. (Hey, I'm probably one of them.)

Even with the apology -- and don't get me wrong, I'm glad she did apologize, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, and I've been pulling away from feminism, at least online feminism, for some time now with each intersectionality fail.

Not all that long ago

I hate the question, "if you could go back and live in any past time, when and why?" I like things like antibiotics, indoor plumbing, the right to vote, so I think I'll stay put in 2013, thankyouverymuch. When I was in, I think, third grade, our class was given this as an assignment. I forgot I was in Catholic school, which meant the correct answer was "Jesus' time!" and instead said the sixties because I wanted to be a hippy. (Wha?)

Anyway, I'm going to retract that now after reading Ms. Magazine's Ten Things American Women Could Not Do Before the 1970s.

1. Keep her job if she was pregnant. 

Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women could be fired from their workplace for being pregnant.

My mom has actually told me stories about going for job interviews in her twenties and having the male interviewer ask if she was pregnant, or planned on getting pregnant.

But unattractive by whose standards?

I'm really enjoying the discussion spawned by Caperton's question "What do you do when you feel unattractive?"  I'm as guilty as anyone of criticizing the feminist blogosphere as dealing in "universals" that are anything but (this is a completely valid criticism, by the way), but the variety of answers, not just in response to the question, but to the standards of "attractiveness" and who gets to decide what beautiful is, illustrates why it's naive to assume that your average blog reader is a young, white cis, het girl living on the east coast.

To answer the original question? I have no no idea. I always too concerned with being smart of cool that a lot of times attractive (in the absolute, physical, male-gaze-y sense) didn't even figure into the equation. And that's hard to write because it makes it sound like I'm trying to convince myself that I'm above all that's superficial. And it's also true -- for me anyway -- that it matters less when you're older. I don't really care what 25-year-olds think about me, so I'm not dressing to impress them. (If one were my boss I'd probably be a little concerned.)

But growing up I knew I wasn't the blue-eyed, blonde cheerleader type: the "cute" girl. If I compared myself to that, I'd be very unhappy. (Although I still fall under the umbrella of whiteness -- and maintain all the privileges that come with that -- I am of a decidedly ethnic variety and have features that mark me as such. I still get "what are you?" a lot.)

Right now I live in a working-class neighborhood in a mid-sized, Midwest city. If I did too much obvious "beautifying," I'd be accused of trying to be better than everyone else. Most of the women I know wear jeans, tee shirts, and minimal makeup unless they're at work. (And most of the people I know wear uniforms to work.) If I lived in New York or LA, maybe I'd feel differently. That probably sounds a little flip, but I think it's an important distinction to make.

Girly Girls and Tomboys

I was in my late-twenties when I first heard the word "girly-girl," long after I stopped calling my self a girl of any kind, thanks to MTV's Made. The premise was pretty simple, and has been repeated several times throughout the show's decade-long run: the tomboy wants to be femmed up. The hair, the nails, the paint the training, the deference to men... you get the idea. Until then, I had naively assumed that women (and men, for that matter) could chose which aspects of femininity and masculinity they wanted to claim as part of their identity, effectively placing everyone on some sort of androgyny spectrum. Those on the extreme fringes of masculine and feminine were relics of the past, like June Cleaver and Arnold Schwarzenegger (pre-Governator). I said I was naive.

Or maybe I was just incredibly lucky. Whenever I read a post like Caperton's (and the one she linked to ), my reaction is to measure my own experience against it: yes, yes, I completely understand, hmm, not so much.

I'm in no place to deny internalized misogyny exists. I know it exists. I wasn't a "girly girl," but I wasn't really a tomboy either, and the pitting of one against the other seems like a relatively recent thing. I said I was lucky, but I also grew up with an idea of femininity that was economically out of reach. The "girl stuff" was expensive, so I decided I didn't want it. (Which is easier than pining for it.) But "boy" stuff held little appeal, too. Maybe my outright rejection of both was a kind of self-protection. Twenty years later, I still can't tell you which click I belonged to.

As for younger women's fear of the "f-word," can I offer some words of encouragement? I identified as a feminist from the moment I knew what one was, but I didn't openly call myself one until college when someone derisively asked if I was "some sort of feminist" after a pretty heated argument on sexual harassment (this may have been around the time of Clarence Thomas hearings). I said yes, yes I was, and it felt incredibly powerful.