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.

BELL HOOKS calls this the patriarchal pulpit," says Rebecca Walker, by way of introduction, as she steps up to the lectern at the front of Faneuil Hall for a Ford Hall Forum in late March. "But I hope to create a more interactive experience. I hope we can have a real time of sharing together."

Walker, editor of an anthology of writing by young women and men called To Be Real (in its fourth printing), and head of the women's activist group Third Wave, is tall and hip, with curly hair cut close to her head. Her silver rings catch the lights whenever she moves her hands, which is often. She seems completely at ease before the hundred or so mostly young, mostly rapt women looking up at her. She sprinkles her speech with pop references only the younger folks in the audience would understand. They nod and laugh appreciatively.

At age 27, Walker is already a veteran of such appearances, one of Time magazine's 50 future leaders of America and a face of late-'90s feminism. "I want to tell you a bit about what was going on in my life when I put this book together," she continues. "I realized that not only would people in my generation have to redefine feminism, but I would, too. That terrified me."

Traditional feminism is mostly about women. Third-wave writing, by contrast, is mostly about feminism. As a critique of the second wave, the third wave makes enough sense to be appealing. And by repackaging it for younger women, third-wave writers give feminism serious style and accessibility points.

Which it apparently needs quite badly. A 1992 Time magazine survey found that although 57 percent of respondents believed there was still a need for a women's movement, only 29 percent thought of themselves as feminists. When Toni Troop, president of the Greater Boston branch of the National Organization for Women, talks to young women in high schools and colleges, "More than 80 percent of them come down unequivocally in favor of women's rights," she says. "But if you ask them if they're feminists, they're not so sure."

"It felt to me like younger women felt discomfort identifying with feminism in general," says Walker. "And from the older women there was a lot of disdain and a real lack of understanding of the perspective of the younger women."

Walker is more respectful of the feminism of her mother, Alice Walker, and of her godmother, Gloria Steinem, than some of her contemporaries are. Both she and Naomi Wolf hold more-traditional feminist positions than do Denfeld, Roiphe, and especially Lehrman. But they share a fundamental complaint: they feel oppressed, to varying degrees, by traditional feminism. Despite its many achievements, second-wave feminism has become a thorn in young women's sides. For some of Walker's contemporaries, it has even become the enemy.

Backlash, The Beauty Myth, feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, antipornography activist Andrea Dworkin, NOW, Ms. magazine -- they're all selling a brand of feminism, and a view of women, that doesn't quite fit anymore. Too political, overly pessimistic, stuck on conspiracy theories, not mindful enough of women's individual experiences. By contrast, third-wave writers put women's private lives -- particularly their own -- front and center.

"There's this continual need to overpoliticize many issues I now feel are personal issues," says Lipstick Proviso author Karen Lehrman. "That takes the responsibility off women and puts it on society and government, and I think women themselves need to do it."

Even Naomi Wolf, whose The Beauty Myth has been much criticized by third-wave writers, has modified her tune. "The thesis of books like Backlash and The Beauty Myth are true," she says, "but that's not the whole truth. The mindset of the second wave is far more primed to lead a young writer like me to do the conspiratorial analysis of how women are victimized rather than how we can end our victimization." Second-wave feminism's us-versus-them mentality, Wolf says, "is not very spiritually evolved."

Walker reads from To Be Real, from her own introduction: "A year before I started this book, my life was like a feminist ghetto. Every decision I made, person I spent time with, word I uttered, had to measure up to an image I had in my mind of what was morally and politically right according to my vision of female empowerment." Then she reads from several essays, including one by a woman guilt-ridden about liking misogynist hip-hop, and another by Naomi Wolf about her discomfort with her own white wedding. All of the essays are about their authors' struggles to apply feminism to their lives a generation after the women's movement as we know it began.

And they seem to agree that the struggle is harder than it should be -- harder precisely because the previous generation of feminists achieved so much. Traditional feminism is still spouting fire and revolutionary zeal when -- hello Roe v. Wade, Pat Schroeder, Hillary, family leave, soccer moms -- lots of good stuff has already happened for women. Second-wave feminism, they argue, needs to chill out, and stop telling women what to do and how to act to qualify as good feminists.

Traditional feminism, says Roiphe, raised awareness of date rape, but it went too far -- making all women into powerless victims, taking the fun out of sex. Feminism has rightly exposed the wrongs of men, says Denfeld, but now persecutes them, and relegates women to the quasi-Victorian status of long-suffering victims. Feminism has successfully introduced women's studies in colleges, but classes have turned into kooky, back-rubby, group-therapy victimhood sessions, says Lehrman, who also argues that feminism denies women their femininity. Feminism has put the kibosh on chivalry, a fact both Lehrman and Roiphe lament. And it has devalued motherhood, making women feel as if they have to combine high-powered careers and family even when they don't really want to.

For younger women who reaped the benefits of the women's movement, such criticisms make sense: women's studies can be overly therapeutic; some feminists do see women as helpless victims and all men as potential rapists; and some traditional feminists do underestimate the gains women have made since the '60s and '70s. For those women, a feminism based on the assumption that women can't take personal responsibility for their own lives is mildly offensive.

And third-wave writers, eminently marketable in a publishing climate where marketing is all, present women like themselves with an attractive, free-to-be-me alternative to traditional feminism. Mostly in their 20s or early 30s, stylish and cool, these writers stare out from moody black-and-whites on their book jackets. They infuse their work with pop-culture references, writing refreshingly, candidly, and optimistically about sex and clothes. They celebrate young women's freedom, and are comfortable assuming they have plenty of choices.

What's not to like?

DURING QUESTION time, Rebecca Walker gets plenty of gushy softballs. A skinny young man from McGill reverently asks her, "Where are we supposed to come out of all this?"

"There's no rule book that tells you what it means to be a feminist," Walker replies. "I'm hoping that To Be Real gives people their own space, to dig around in their own psyches. I'm looking for a feminism that is decentralized."

Next, a young black woman, who looks to be about Walker's age, steps up to the microphone. "We've been passing your book around, the four of us," she says, pointing to her friends, "and we really love it. My question is, what do you think qualifies you to put this anthology together?"

Walker puts her hand to her chest, gives the woman a quizzical look, recomposes herself. "That's an interesting question," she says. "I'll try to take that as a gentle question, and not an antagonistic one. Um, that's pretty interesting. What makes you ask that question?"

It was simple enough, really, and innocently meant. But it requires a shift in thinking that many of Walker's contemporaries seem to have difficulty making. Third-wave writers are central to their own works; they're qualified to hold forth on the fallout from second-wave feminism, and on the situation of women, because they're living it. Period. No one, after all, would ask what qualifies someone to write a memoir -- a form to which much third-wave writing comes very close.

"Well," Walker replies. "I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time, and I'm as entitled as any other artist or thinker."

As a critique of traditional feminism, third-wave writing makes sense for many women. But a critique of feminism does not a women's movement make. As much as they criticize second-wave feminists for being overly prescriptive, and for failing to appreciate each woman's uniqueness, third-wave writers allow their own lives and experiences to determine their view of where feminism's priorities should be. And their own lives and experiences are vastly different from most women's.

To Be Real is composed almost entirely of first-person pieces by writers digging around in their own psyches, as Walker puts it. Roiphe's The Morning After, about date-rape hype on college campuses, also draws on her own experiences (of hype, not rape). Her Last Night in Paradise is about sexual repression, again drawing heavily on her life, and on that of her HIV-positive sister. Naomi Wolf's latest, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, about the torture of girls' sexual awakening, goes into great detail about her own San Francisco adolescence. And Karen Lehrman, who in a March 30 Washington Post article derided the current memoir epidemic ("Gratuitous displays of a woman's sexual proclivities or emotional angst aren't necessarily empowering"), begins each of her chapters in The Lipstick Proviso with an episode from her personal life.

As the swarm of Prozac-, alcohol-, and incest-laden memoirs foisted on the American public lately shows only too well, that kind of thing sells -- or at least gets airtime and ink. And these books are riding that trend. Those marketing folk don't get the big bucks for nothing.

Naomi Wolf, for one, maintains that personal details make feminist books more accessible to women. But there's a danger in it, too. Self-absorption in a memoir, tiresome or no, is kind of the point. In some of these feminist books, though, the writers use their own experiences to drive their arguments, drawing from them major conclusions about women and feminism, apparently believing their own experiences to be distillations of all women's.

To wit: in The Morning After, Katie Roiphe challenges the statistics for acquaintance rape on college campuses: if so many women are being raped, she asks, wouldn't she know some of them? In The Lipstick Proviso, one of Lehrman's main arguments is that sisterhood -- the idea that women have common political interests, a linchpin of traditional feminism -- is a myth ("I am a sister only to my brother," she writes). To start that chapter, Lehrman tells the story of her friend "Nena": "tall and thin with cool retro glasses," spouter of anti-patriarchal proverbs, roommate of Lehrman's boyfriend. You can see where this is going: when Lehrman breaks up with her boyfriend, Nena promptly snatches him for herself. "Since then, I've been far more alert to women who treat other women with less than sisterly affection," Lehrman writes. "Artificial sisterhood is not only a crock, as Nena demonstrated," she concludes. "It is also not especially empowering."

Both Lehrman and Roiphe might have perfectly good points about date rape and sisterhood, but where they run aground is that, having subjected the reader to their misty watercolors, they then take the next step and say, "As I go, so go all women."

But Katie Roiphe is not like all women. She grew up in an Upper West Side brownstone, with Up the Sandbox author Anne Roiphe for a mother; she had a Princeton education, and a book contract before age 25. Rebecca Walker's mother is an even more famous writer; Naomi Wolf's parents were ultra-liberal, and liberated, San Francisco academics. None of this means that their experiences are any less valid than other women's, but it does seem scary to suggest that conclusions about the lives of American women -- the welfare mother in Newport, or the housewife in Warwick -- can be extrapolated from those of Roiphe et al.

This is hardly a novel criticism. Second-wave feminists have been criticized for being similarly out of touch with ordinary women. But second- and third-wave feminists were born into very different worlds, and are out of touch in very different ways. Second-wave feminists faced the same legislative and political obstacles to their rights as poorer or nonprofessional women did. Third-wave feminists, who reaped the benefits of the movement politically, do not face many of the problems their less lucky counterparts do.

Before 1973, for example, no woman could get a legal abortion, whatever her economic situation. Now it's just poor women who can't get them. Before protections were in place against sexual harassment, all women had little choice but to put up with it. Now, that's true only of women who lack the resources and knowledge to pursue harassment claims.

But from where your garden-variety post-feminist sits -- i.e., at the center of the universe -- things are looking pretty good. "There will always be a need for vigilance," writes Karen Lehrman, "But many of the problems that plague most women (in the West) on a daily basis now fall in the personal realm: government can do little to solve them."

UNWITTINGLY OR not, third-wave writers give the strong impression that the world is now kind to women, thereby ceding important ground to critics of feminism, and to those who would undo the gains of the second wave. By moving feminism's agenda from politics and economics to bedrooms and cosmetics counters, third-wave writers effectively sidestep many of the serious problems that still beset women, and undermine attempts to fix them.

There's no denying that women's lives have improved more in one generation than they did over the previous century. Nor is it unreasonable to expect those women who can take more responsibility for their own lives and happiness to do so. However, if second-wave feminists are overly pessimistic about women in the '90s, third-wave writers are overly optimistic.

If you were to take a snapshot of women in America even now, it wouldn't be a pretty picture. White women still earn only 71 cents for every dollar a white man earns. Over 95 percent of this country's top executives are still white men. Domestic abuse is the leading cause of injury for women between 15 and 44, and 1.8 million women were seriously assaulted by men in the last 12 months. Over 90,000 rapes are reported each year. Many women still have inadequate access to birth control, and face insurmountable obstacles to abortion. For some women, none of the old problems have gone away, despite feminism's huge victories.

Indeed, talk to any feminist activist and she'll tell you that things have actually been sliding for women lately: state legislatures all over the country have limited access to abortion for minors, setting parental consent and waiting-period rules. Welfare-reform legislation affects women far more than men, imposing family caps without adequately providing for good birth control, and work requirements without child care for many women.

"Where is it that we've entered the promised land," Susan Faludi scoffs, "other than in our choice of lipstick?"

And, contrary to what their popular image suggests, most feminists do deal with those kinds of problems. NOW, that bulwark of second-wave feminism, and a favorite piñata of post-ideological feminists, spends much of its energies helping women for whom lingerie guilt is a long way off. The Boston office gets about 20 calls a week from women seeking counsel because they're being sexually harassed at work, or are losing too much in a divorce, or being paid too little compared to male equivalents. NOW's Toni Troop and her colleagues are also lobbying private companies to extend domestic-partner benefits to employees, and to accommodate working mothers with flextime and other work arrangements.

And Emily's List, the political-action committee begun almost 12 years ago, is working to further enfranchise women, raising money -- these days, lots of it -- to get women elected to office. There are nine women in the US Senate (and 91 men), and only 51 women in the 435-member House. "If we relied on the traditional structures in place," says Karin Johanson, communications director for the PAC, "we wouldn't even have that many women in office." Women senators and legislators have won increased funding for research into breast cancer, fought welfare-reform legislation, and opposed assaults on women's reproductive freedoms.

And both organizations are healthy. NOW's membership, which surged after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy, has remained steady at 200,000. Emily's List, which women joined in droves after those hearings, has grown to 66,000 members. Although the marginal extremes of traditional feminism may well bear little connection to real women's lives, the rest of the movement still plays an important role in them.

Yet, many third-wave critiques of feminism remain fixated on those extremes. In other words, Roiphe, Lehrman, Denfeld, & Company have taken the silly fringes, academic edges, and media stereotypes of the women's movement, balled them up into a big ol' hairy-legged straw woman, and are beating away. "Lehrman, like a lot of women her age, was raised on a particular brand of feminism which wasn't really feminism, but pop culture's version of feminism," says Faludi, who has gone head-to-head with Lehrman recently, most notably in the online magazine Slate. "It's the consumer-culture idea that you can have it all. She feels feminism has cheated her because she can't be the Aviance woman, where you come home looking ravishing and fry up the bacon. There's this disconnect between what feminism is about and what it became once it was mediated through TV screens."

"I confess," writes Gloria Steinem in her foreword to To Be Real, "that there are moments in these pages when I -- and perhaps other readers over thirty-five -- feel like a sitting dog being told to sit." Motherhood, lipstick, and miniskirts have always been a part of the women's movement, she notes.

But since they've shifted their emphasis from the public world of politics and social problems and onto women's private lives, third-wave writers are predisposed to diminish, or overlook, the important political- and social-activism work feminists do, and to concentrate instead on their intrusion into women's personal lives.

By painting traditional feminists as a kind of PC police force, they inadvertently perpetuate the stereotypes that continue to alienate women from feminism. And they provide extra ammunition for the Rush Limbaughs of the world, who don't discriminate between second- and third-wave feminists.

Certainly, there are third-wave writers who still see the political as vital to feminism. "In our personal lives, we're finding things are much more fuzzy and complicated," Rebecca Walker says, "but in the world, there's nothing fuzzy and complicated about the welfare bill." Walker's Third Wave activist group continues along the more traditional lines of a NOW or an Emily's List. "Thank God," says Walker. "Otherwise I'd be screwed -- and skewered."

Ditto Naomi Wolf. Despite her shift from too-simple second-wave feminism, Wolf is more heavily involved politically now than ever, having advised White House policymakers on women's issues, and worked to improve the situations of women refugees and prostitutes.

However. All of those are-men-really-that-bad-all-I-really-need-is-a-good-one Esquire stories add up to something, and, like it or not, third-wave feminists helped to put them there. The logical extension of even the most respectful third-wave writing is The Lipstick Proviso, in which Lehrman makes the mind-boggling observation that "The huge main problem with contemporary feminism is that it has attached itself to a political agenda." (She also gladly concedes that "Activism supporting abortion rights and battered women and rape-crisis work is incredibly important, and we need to do more of it." Go figure.)

Welfare reform, which affects so many more women than men, is "outside the scope of feminism," she says. "The problem that poor women exist is not a problem of feminism," she continues, "it's a problem of class. The point of feminism is equality of opportunity for women, not equality of result."

But class problems and women's problems are inextricable. What to do when political acts affect women far more adversely than men? That welfare reform has effectively nixed equality of opportunity for some women recipients -- by, say, relegating them to minimum-wage jobs indefinitely -- has apparently not occurred to Lehrman.

Because it sucks the politics -- and therefore women's most intractable problems -- out of feminism, Lehrman's work dovetails perfectly with the current political climate in this country. "It's part of a larger dynamic in the culture," says Faludi, "in which people are urged to turn their eyes away from political concerns, and inward, and not in a spiritual way, either. Forget about the political revolutionary pursuits: just have a revolution with your Nike sneakers. It takes all the language of political rhetoric and hollows it out."

It occurs to few in the third wave to see feminism's decline in the context of America's retreat from all kinds of labels and politics since the Republican landslide of 1994. It's not just feminism that's a dirty word these days. "Liberal" is having such a rough time of it that even our Democrat president has trouble saying the word, choosing instead wishy-washy, jello terms like "the politics of meaning" and various and sundry verses from Isaiah. Maybe it's not just feminism that's out of sync with today's world: it's the idea of holding any political philosophy at all.

WHAT'S LEFT is Spice Girls feminism. As "Scary Spice" Mel B put it in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview: "You can wear your Wonderbra, you can wear your mascara, but you've got a bit of intelligence. . . . Don't rely on your sexuality, but don't be afraid of it."

"Just because you've got a short skirt on and a pair of tits, you can still say what you want to say. We're still very strong," Baby Spice Emma chimed in. Heavy.

The Spice Girls have been anointed a feminist pop outfit by more than a few writers. The Spicies themselves prefer the term Girl Power: personal, and especially sexual, empowerment is central to their act. And sexy feminism certainly works as a marketing approach (the fact that the quintet churning out the prefab Brit-pop also have good abs and producers helps, too). They take feminism's shell, and fill it up with lip gloss, ribbed condoms, and girls-on-top innuendo. Nobody tells the Spice Girls what to do. They're young and stylish and sexy as they wannabe. And they chew men up and spit 'em out:

I won't be hasty, I'll give you a try

If you really bug me then I'll say goodbye.

It's balder and tackier, but it's very much like what many third-wave writers are saying: if every woman felt that free, we'd all be fine.

Feminism should now concern itself with "personal work," Karen Lehrman says. "Under real feminism," she writes, "women have ultimate responsibility for their problems, happiness and lives.

"The personal, in other words, is no longer political." Instead of agitating on Capitol Hill, feminists would do better to revive consciousness-raising groups for poor women, says Lehrman: it's all about self-esteem now. Which is distressingly close to the touchy-feeliness she pillories in much of her work.

None of the other third-wave writers goes quite as far as Lehrman, but hers is the logical conclusion of feminism's retreat into the personal. Girl Power has its limits. Take away the sexual freedom and the guiltless push-up bras and you're not left with much.

"For so many of these women," says Faludi, "what they want to break off and call feminism is their own personal advancement, their own personal freedoms, their own personal choices, so feminism must be about what I want to wear, about fashion and beauty and flirting at the office. Here's our new brand of feminism. Tastes good, less filling."

Problem is, a lot of women need something more substantial. But enough about them. Let's talk about me.

Me, me, me.

Childhood extraordinarily ordinary . . . n

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