Let’s go back in history for a second. Waaaay back. Not quite to the primordial soup, but almost. People who subscribe to the theory of evolution – many Americans don’t but most of the civilized world does – believe that for much of human history, the vast majority of it, we lived in a world which was harsh and unforgiving, in which the strength of men was needed to protect women and children from the elements and from predators. Men slew beasts, built shelter, and mastered fire. (Actually it doesn’t necessarily have to have been men who mastered fire, it could have been women, but we usually lump the mastery of fire along with the slaying of beasts and building of shelter and whatnot.) Later on men also mastered the art and science of farming, to which women may very well have contributed but it took a lot of muscle power to make it happen, so it was still very much a male-dominated type of work.
The general picture of the prehistoric world, and even much of the historic world, is one of men doing work and women raising babies. There are all kinds of assumptions around this picture of the world, we don’t really know how close to truth it is, but it’s probably not a stretch at all to believe that men’s physical strength relative to women’s has greatly impacted their respective roles in society.
But the world changed. Probably the biggest changes, for the purpose of this post, started to come in the nineteenth century, when we starting building more and more machines to perform tasks which had previously required a lot of onerous manual labour. Before long we were building factories, machines were being replaced by robots, and within a very short period of time (historically speaking) we lived in a world in which men’s and women’s relative differences in physical strength were, for the most part, irrelevant.
I’m guessing this really hit home for people over the course of World War II. While the men went off to fight the war women stayed home and took over the operation of the factories. They were now doing jobs which had formerly been entirely done by men. After the war the surviving men came back home and took the factory jobs back, but the seed had been planted: women were capable of doing these jobs. They didn’t have to be done by big, burly men.
As time went on women started joining the workforce more and more, and taking more diverse types of jobs. They weren’t just secretaries anymore, they were moving into all areas of the economy. And for the most part, there was no difference in women’s abilities in these areas than in men’s abilities; men invented all kinds of reasons why women couldn’t do the jobs as well as men, but frankly many of those reasons don’t stand up to scrutiny. Actually, I shouldn’t be making this a “men vs. women” dichotomy, because that’s much too simplistic. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of women agreed with men on the idea that some jobs are better done by men than by women. At any rate, regardless of the fact that women were getting more and more involved in the workforce, they were not getting paid as well as men, and they were hitting a glass ceiling preventing them from getting into management positions – these were still strictly in the domain of men.
In a way, society was clinging to the pre-historic view of the world in which men were the strong protectors and providers and women were the weak, protected baby-havers. I’m oversimplifying, but hey, that’s what bloggers do: we oversimplify.
Out of this situation feminism started to gain ground, wherein women tried to gain some equality with men and fight for rights they didn’t have. Why shouldn’t women be paid as much as men for doing the same jobs? Why should women be prevented from moving into management- and executive-level positions? Why should women be prevented from voting? There were reasons for all of these inequalities, but they didn’t stand up to scrutiny. They still don’t, but these issues still exist; women are allowed to vote now – hooray! – but they still don’t get paid as much as men for doing the same work and there’s still a large gap between women and men when it comes to management- and executive-level positions.
I don’t know my history as well as I should, but I think feminism really started to go mainstream in the 1960s. Speeches were made; bras – which were made to show off breasts in a very man-pleasing way – were burned; sexual norms were questioned. On that last point, the widespread availability of the Pill played a big part; women had much more control of their own sexual life. They were able to have sex, if they desired, without having to drop out of the workforce to have and raise babies.
Something else was also gaining traction in the 60s: television. As feminism became more and more mainstream, television started broadcasting the fact to the public. But we all have our biases, and so does television; it is, after all, simply a technology, which requires humans to write scripts for sitcoms and copy for newsreaders and to decide what goes on the news and what doesn’t. So how did television present feminism? It was portrayed as a disruptive force. Feminists were ugly lesbians with hairy armpits who wanted to kill all men (except for a few who could provide sperm for the women to have each other’s babies). Their arguments were dismissed as silly, though the arguments themselves were rarely actually presented, they were just talked about.
To be clear, I’m not trying to push a conspiracy theory here, in which male television executives made a conscious decision to denigrate feminism in order to keep their power. What I am saying is that television executives (and sitcom writers and copywriters and advertisers and everyone else) were men, who had their own biases – whether questioned/recognized or not – and these biases inevitably made their way into how feminism was portrayed in the media. Perhaps if there had been a bunch of female television executives they could have asked some hard questions, people could have reexamined their motives, and things might have turned out differently, but there weren’t, so they didn’t.
This was the case until well into the 80s, and maybe even into the 90s. While feminism went down and up and down in mainstream acceptance, its portrayal in the media was usually negative – those hairy dykes – while its successes were over-emphasized to the point that people began to believe that the battle was won and feminism wasn’t necessary anymore. Which is, you have to admit, a neat trick: “those lesbian feminists aren’t saying anything worth listening to... but they’ve won the battle so they’re not important anymore.” Doublethink at its finest, and it worked. People definitely believe, today, that the glass ceiling has been shattered, even though the facts tell us that women still make less than men and women still hold fewer management- and executive-level positions than men.
I hate to tell you, but up to now this has all been prologue. I’m only now getting to the point.
In the 1990s things started to change again. It might have started in the 80s, people can definitely quibble with me on the dates, but personally I put the blame for this change on one particular group of women which came to being in the 90s and changed the public’s idea of feminism for the next twenty years. A very small group, consisting of just five women. I’m talking, of course, about the Spice Girls.
Hold your incredulity, I can explain. And to be clear, I’m not saying they changed things in a good way. (At least... not for women.)
The reason the Spice Girls changed our view of feminism was that they introduced the phrase “Girl Power” to the culture. It had been used before, and people like Madonna had started going down this path, but in my opinion the Spice Girls took it mainstream in a way that predecessors hadn’t. What is “girl power”? I have no fucking idea. As applied by the Spice Girls, “girl power” seems to be the power to dress sexy, and be cute, and... um... maybe it includes some other things, too, but I don’t know what they are. Wikipedia’s article on the Spice Girls says that “girl power:”
... was a label for the particular facet of post classical neo-feminist empowerment embraced by the band: that a sensual, feminine appearance and equality between the sexes need not be mutually exclusive.One could oversimplify this and say, “you can be girly and sexy and still be equal with men, and/or fight for equality with men.” And, to be clear, I don’t disagree with that at all. You can, and you can.
My problem with the Spice Girls is that being girly and sexy is all they did, but by using this phrase “girl power” they were claiming that they were doing more. “By being cute and feminine,” they were claiming, “we’re embodying ‘girl power’!” And so of course their fans started to mix up the concepts of feminism and sexiness in a weird way. What is feminism? “Who knows, but I have the right to wear short skirts if I want!” Well... you go right ahead. Men won’t complain about that. So... battle won? I guess?
Whether or not the Spice Girls take the blame for this, as I’m positing, the fact is that the media’s portrayal of feminism started to change. The emphasis was no longer on hairy dykes, it was now on young, sexy girly-girls, using the phrase “girl power,” being exceedingly cute, and claiming to be feminists while not actually saying anything of substance about women’s rights, or equality with men. As portrayed by the media, feminism was starting to become the right to dress sexy, the right for girls to have sex as much as they want, and not much else.
I’ve already mentioned Madonna, and she had tried to do this in the past, but at the time the media wasn’t ready for her. In her day feminists were still ugly dykes; so through the media’s lens Madonna wasn’t a feminist she was just a slut. But by the time the Spice Girls came on the scene the media was starting to catch on. Because you know what gets good ratings? Young, sexy girly-girls whose only real point of substance is that they want the right to have sex without being judged for it. That’s ratings gold!
So the Spice Girls get a bunch of airtime for their vacuous views on “girl power,” not really saying much but dressing sexy, and the next thing you know you get a generation of girls growing up who think that this shallow notion of “girl power” is somehow related to feminism. Christina Aguilera takes things even further, fighting very explicitly for her right to have sex as much as she wants with whomever she wants without being judged differently than a man would for doing the same thing, and the media is happy to use the term “feminist” because it’s a form of feminism that’s not going to change anything of substance. The very word starts to get watered down; feminism can mean whatever you want it to mean! Are you fighting for equality of women? You’re a feminist. Are you proud to dress sexy? You’re a feminist. Are you a female CEO of a Fortune 500 company? You’re a feminist. Are you a male who “appreciates women”? You’re a female ally.
And to make sure, again, that I’m clear: I don’t disagree with these views. Women should be able to dress sexy without being judged for it (and without getting raped). Women should be able to have as much sex, with as many partners, as they want, without being judged for it differently than a man would. Both of these are things I agree with. My only issue is that feminism is more than this, and I think we have an entire generation of girls and women whose only view of feminism is the ‘right to dress sexy’ part of it.
And my response? Well, speaking as a man: it’s fucking awesome! You want to dress sexy, girls? Go for it! Consequence-free sex with as many partners as you want? Hit me up in the comments; I’ll give you my address! (You’re OK with married dudes, right? I’m sure you can invent some bullshit about marriage being just a construct and make it OK.) You want the right to consume porn, just like men do? Go for it – as I’ve already written, it will help teach you to become our sex slaves!
And go ahead and call it feminism if you want, too. It helps to focus the public’s attention on the aspects of feminism that allow men to keep their power – and I got me a good, high-paying job that I’d like to keep.
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