“Post-feminists ‘…explicitly define themselves [as] against… [while criticizing] feminists of the Second Wave‘ (women’s liberation movement). [In post-feminist thought], individual improvement replaces collective improvement, while the results of the collective action of the second wave movement are taken as a given. (Dworkin and Wachs, p. 139)”
While taking for granted certain freedoms that were hard-won by previous generations of women, today’s privileged classes of women seek to distance themselves from anything recalling feminism.
Today’s post-feminism is a disempowered one, regardless of how many “empowering” slogans it uses (to get you to the gym!), quite simply because it has become depoliticized and commodified. Post-feminists are consumed by self-improvement, individualism, and swim in a false “us” vs. “them” dichotomy defined by an outdated, defunct understanding of feminism. Post-feminists respond to Third Wave Feminism much like a Victorian era human might respond to a 2012 computer. Misunderstanding its function or purpose, there may be fear, disdain, deflection, or the whole contraption (concept) might be ignored.†
The challenges that face any given gendered population revolve around a variety of influences and factors. It is becoming increasingly clear that Second Wave feminism’s Objectification Theory needs to be expanded to include boys and men in today’s late-capitalist consumer culture. But the ability to extend this theory to include boys and men is possible because of outgrowths of feminism, namely Queer Theory and Third Wave Feminism.
Third Wave Feminism seeks to shift the locus of the gender conversation back to society and culture, uproots the privileged, white, western, female’s point of view in exchange for a plurality of voices and narratives, and takes into consideration the influences and impacts of one’s social location (race, ethnicity, creed, culture, socio-economic status) on the experience of being gendered.
The conversation has changed yet those who would reject feminism are doing so without a clear understanding of the newest wave in feminism. The current US political climate requires political citizens who care about women to pay attention to what is going on. The depoliticization of feminism into a weak, nostalgic “commodity feminism” within which marketing creates, then sells, you the idea that the most important “choice” you can make is what brand of clothing to buy or how best to focus on shaping your body into an elite, strong (but never TOO strong!) yoga (bikram, ashtanga…), runners, walkers, gym, surfing, pilates… body. All this costs money and takes time.
It’s easy to get distracted by all the messages about our lack (lack of the perfect body shape, lack of the best hand-bag, lack, lack, lack) or his lack, or their lack. The consumer culture is an extraordinary distraction, deflecting and shifting attention away from itself onto the gendered bodies of human beings. Though this is a trend impacting men and boys on a growing basis, it must be noted that the body anxiety experienced by women has a more powerful impact due to deeply embedded cultural norms and habits:
“Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities. One study demonstrated this fragmenting quite vividly (Fredrickson et al., 1998). While alone in a dressing room, college students were asked to try on and evaluate either a swimsuit or a sweater.”
“While they waited for 10 minutes wearing the garment, they completed a math test. The results revealed that young women in swimsuits performed significantly worse on the math problems than did those wearing sweaters. No differences were found for young men. In other words, thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity.”
“Recent research has shown that this impairment occurs among African American, Latina, and Asian American young women (Hebl, King, & Lin, 2004) and extends beyond mathematics to other cognitive domains including logical reasoning and spatial skills (Gapinski, Brownell, & LaFrance, 2003) (Report of the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls, Cognitive and Physical Functioning, p. 21).”*
“[T]he near-constant monitoring of appearance that accompanies self-objectification leads to increased feelings of shame about one’s body (e.g., Fredrickson et al., 1998; McKinley, 1998, 1999;Tiggemann & Slater, 2001). Shame is an emotion that occurs when one perceives one’s failure to meet cultural standards of conduct (Lewis, 2000). Individuals who feel shame deem the whole self as deficient and typically have the urge to hide or disappear. Given that so few women meet the dominant cultural standard for an attractive, sexy appearance (Wolf, 1991), it is not surprising that a girl’s chronic comparison of her own body to this impossible cultural standard would result in feelings of inadequacy and shame (ibid., p. 23).”
It is imperative that we stand up from wherever it is we are (don’t wait until our voices are perfect, or our bodies, or…), not be silent, and not be dissuaded by false choice in the realm of consumerism. In an environment that is undermining women’s reproductive and health rights, pay disparity, arguing over who controls the realms of the female body, and is persistent in sexualizing and hypersexualizing the bodies of women, it is equally important that the conversation shift from individuals to the society and culture in general again. We need to embrace feminism in its evolved mode and gaze through this lens in order to question why our society is the way it is and whose interests misdirection, body anxiety, and depoliticization serve.
† To explore a shifting 3rd Wave Feminism- Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, specifically, Contests for the Meaning of Third Wave Feminism: Feminism and Popular Consciousness pp. 24-36
*The Report of the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls includes a section on how this trend affects boys, men, and the greater society.
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