What's a Modern Girl to Do? - New York Times

if you can stand it.

why am i totally not feeling conflicted about being a feminist?

[updated: this article has flown all over the place and it even made the dinner conversation tonight with a couple of girlfriends. it's a more important piece than that lame 'ivy league girls give work the finger' article but it's still slightly problematic.

i don't have a quarrel with dowd's view on pop culture. the sexual codes floating around out there are regressive; we have a generation of young women who don't know the first thing about feminist history or their connection to it; we have a whole slew of men who are still infantilized, much to the chagrin of a small segment of the female population who would like, yes, a partner in life, not another child. we've heard of the man-child, the kids who are still living at home, the women who think the view of the 50s is nifty. the failure of the 'have it all' lifestyle, blah blah. i have no doubt about any of these things.

i have a problem with her main thesis: "Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century." for dowd, the problem isn't patriarchy but feminism. the backlash against feminism has nothing to do with the phallocentric nature of our institutions, the way that masculine power is disseminated and replicated in our culture, or even the basic inability of the general male population to fucking evolve. no, the bloom is off feminism's rose because feminism itself rubbed it off with its own hand.

for dowd, the reason women are so confused and men are still so maddeningly retro is because women have changed the rules, don't know the rules, or ignore the rules, or haven't. in her analysis, this dance of the sexes is our burden to shoulder; it's our maze to navigate. men just get to passively respond to what's put in front of them and their position is never really problematized.

the editor of maxim gets to thoughtfully furrow his brow and muse of his surprise "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."

um, yeah, how fucking extraordinary! as if this extraordinary thing just freaking happened! it's not as if this desire to be validated as a walking vagina with fake breasts just accidentally became the norm! not only are ed's ideas left standing there, blinking dumbly at us, the ideas behind his ideas are completely accepted as 'accident.'

there is no accident. the big white elephant in dowd's piece is masculinity. the crisis in masculinity, the narrative of masculinity, the blankness of masculinity. behind all her examples of courtship, beauty, ambition, pop culture, she posits women as the cause of all this topsi-turviness. i don't buy it. it's the hollow core of patriarchy and its empty codes of masculinity that are the culprit here. maxim's choice to replicate a type of fraternity boy masculinity, or a bill maher's decision to voice masculine desire for a woman to 'shut up', creates a cultural atmosphere that requires a woman to acquiesce to a shallow and fragile childish ego. that is, if she wants masculine attention.

let's face it; this is dowd's real question - why aren't i the object of the masculine gaze? waah waah.

her writing is so fucking heterosexist.

i'd like to rewrite her thesis:
Little did I realize that the idea that women are people would have the unexpected consequence of confusing men, leaving them in a tangle of dependence and shallow bravado as they entered the 21st century.]