Lipstick liberation

Feminism used to be about securing social, economic, and political equality for women. Now the talk is of makeup, miniskirts, and me, me, me.

by Yvonne Abraham

Dear Publisher,

Enough about you. Let's talk about me.

Me, me, me.

Childhood extraordinarily ordinary. Family abnormally normal. Adolescence momentously unmomentous. Life to date remarkably unremarkable.

Could pass for twentysomething. Could pass for writer. Took women's-studies courses in college. Feel guilty for skipping Take Back the Night march junior year. Feel guilty about spending $16 on Vamp. Don't want to feel guilty anymore. Will fess up, when pushed, to angst about place in universe. Will, if absolutely necessary, recount tragically horrifically embarrassingly ill-advised sexual encounters from pre-Vamp era.

Therefore, judging by current spate of books on market, am eminently qualified to write memoir or, better yet, memoir-ish post-feminist text (with portrait of brooding but attractive self on jacket, please?), drawing heavily on highly typical personal experience as proof of central arguments re: current state of women.

Thesis of book: oppression by men no longer main problem for feminists. New culprit? Feminism itself.

Please send contract.

Seems like only yesterday that traditional feminism was looking pretty darn healthy. In 1991, Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth were released, both challenging the Virginia Slims version of women's progress: A long way, baby? Yeah, right. Both books were hits, lingering on bestseller lists for months. And the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings galvanized women into such a state of pissed-offedness that they swept unprecedented numbers into government in the 1992 election. Heady days for feminists.

But they didn't last long. Hot on the -- one hesitates to say heels -- of Backlash and The Beauty Myth have come a steady run of books and articles. Many of these are by women who were born with choices their mothers couldn't take for granted; all writers identify themselves as feminists; and all of the books take a dim view of traditional feminism. Among them are Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus; Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women; Rebecca Walker's To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism; and Rene Denfeld's The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order. Even Naomi Wolf, herself a target of these critiques, has been inching closer to this group of late.

The books spawned talk-show appearances, articles, op-eds, and such, most notably a piece in Esquire about "do me" feminism, a piece in Ms. in which Faludi refers to Roiphe et al. as "pod feminists," an article in Mother Jones in which journalist Karen Lehrman says women's studies is a ludicrous crock, and another recent Esquire piece in which Roiphe says she wants some big, protective guy to just come take care of her, please (and she knows that's what you want, too, deep down).

There are few signs that the stream of publications will let up anytime soon. This past month or two has seen new titles by Wolf, Denfeld, and Roiphe, and a first book from Lehrman: The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex and Power in the Real World.

It's been referred to variously as post-feminism, revisionist feminism, post-ideological feminism, and liberal feminism, but the label that's sticking best these days is "third-wave feminism." The first wave -- the women's-suffrage movement -- began feminism by planting the idea that women deserve equal rights under the law. But it's the second wave that has defined modern feminism. "The personal is political" was the movement's classic slogan: all the extra burdens women are forced to bear privately -- from harassment to domestic abuse -- are social problems that demand public solutions.

The third wave defines itself primarily in contrast to the second. Despite these writers' many differences (most of them wouldn't be caught dead with the others), the upshot of their work is that traditional second-wave feminism has made women's lives more difficult than they should be. It has put more demands on them than they should have to handle, elided the personal in favor of the political, and relegated women to what Rebecca Walker calls "a feminist ghetto."

It's unlikely that third-wave feminists will be relegated to any kind of ghetto: they're too marketable. Unlike their second-wave forebears, they're completely in sync with their times, and, more significant, with publishing trends. These days, sensational personal revelations get big-time attention, and are sure ways to move books and boost TV ratings. These feminists wisely exploit that, many of them peppering their analysis with compelling personal details, or vice versa.

When they write about traditional feminism's under-appreciation of the personal obstacles some women still battle, and the gains many of them have made, third wavers have a something of a point. But they go too far.

Second-wave feminists, confronted with a world that revolved around men, wanted -- and in some measure got -- a world that also revolved around women. Third Wave feminists write as if the world revolved around them: not men, not women, but them. In so doing, they help shift debate about women's lives from larger -- and still vital -- political and economic questions to individual dilemmas over cosmetics, fetishes, and guilt. Like some kind of fantastic whirlybird, third-wave writers fly in smaller and smaller circles, zooming in on ever more personal issues, threatening finally to disappear up their own media-savvy behinds, taking feminism -- and, most important, the causes of less lucky women -- with them.

Part 2

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.