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Some old things (2006). Letter to My Mother and Letter to My Daugher, from Alternet. For whatever reason, whenever I read about the mommy wars and the mother-daughter rift in feminism I more often find myself sympathizing with the mom/second wave even though I've had original thoughts that definitely are more in line with third wave influence (which I guess is to say I'm a post-structuralist). I wonder why that is.
But I also think that a lot of supposed differences are "mere" dialoging problems, like:
We want to fight the good fight, but we want to make sweet love too. We want our partners -- girl, boy or something radically in between -- beside us. We want boys to be less buttoned-up and more down for parenting and dancing to stupid '80s music in public; if they pay for dinner, unlike Maureen Dowd's hyperbolic claims, it doesn't mean we are riddled with '50s-era nostalgia. We just don't take some things as seriously as you do.
vs
Men and women are different in ways crucial to the way that businesses are run and social infrastructure is put into place. I think women will govern in a more collaborative way and take the effects of their decisions on women and children more into account than men do presently. Perhaps when men have had years of experience with hands-on parenting, more permission to experience their own feelings and a chance to expand their focus beyond the quickest way to get up the corporate ladder, then I'll revise my assessment, and these differences won't exist in quite the same way if they exist at all.
? Not actually incompatible. Obviously.
I'll admit that sometimes I think third wave indignation is more just the need for a rebel to have a cause, young people are like that, non? But mostly I think it's just that when messages spread it's hard to be both portable and precise all at once, and so inevitably not all messages can get out at the same time. That's probably one thing waves are good for, you can have pioneers and then settlers and then developers etc etc. I still get a little turned off by the element of third wave feminism that seeks to distance itself from second wave feminism. Not all of what the second wave said is irrelevant, not for everyone, and it feels sometimes like those who have progressed further get impatient because they have the luxury to.
And sometimes it feels unfair for a third wave feminist to blame a second wave feminist for being so serious. It was a tougher fight then, and it just ... always feels really unfair to me to blame people for getting angry at things they really have every right to be angry about, just because it's not as fun. Not that I think that that is all the third wave is about or that all third wavers have think that way. Just, yeah. Sometimes. Annoyed.
Blah blah blah. Why am I so old.
How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart
Yo Mamma" Hillary Clinton as the battleground in the war between mothers and daughters
NPR: Feminist Mother, Daughter Reconcile their Past
More Than a Mother-Daughter Debate
Mothertopia: "The ones who betray women the most are other women."
Girl on girl crime is ever so endlessly ironic.
But I also think that a lot of supposed differences are "mere" dialoging problems, like:
We want to fight the good fight, but we want to make sweet love too. We want our partners -- girl, boy or something radically in between -- beside us. We want boys to be less buttoned-up and more down for parenting and dancing to stupid '80s music in public; if they pay for dinner, unlike Maureen Dowd's hyperbolic claims, it doesn't mean we are riddled with '50s-era nostalgia. We just don't take some things as seriously as you do.
vs
Men and women are different in ways crucial to the way that businesses are run and social infrastructure is put into place. I think women will govern in a more collaborative way and take the effects of their decisions on women and children more into account than men do presently. Perhaps when men have had years of experience with hands-on parenting, more permission to experience their own feelings and a chance to expand their focus beyond the quickest way to get up the corporate ladder, then I'll revise my assessment, and these differences won't exist in quite the same way if they exist at all.
? Not actually incompatible. Obviously.
I'll admit that sometimes I think third wave indignation is more just the need for a rebel to have a cause, young people are like that, non? But mostly I think it's just that when messages spread it's hard to be both portable and precise all at once, and so inevitably not all messages can get out at the same time. That's probably one thing waves are good for, you can have pioneers and then settlers and then developers etc etc. I still get a little turned off by the element of third wave feminism that seeks to distance itself from second wave feminism. Not all of what the second wave said is irrelevant, not for everyone, and it feels sometimes like those who have progressed further get impatient because they have the luxury to.
And sometimes it feels unfair for a third wave feminist to blame a second wave feminist for being so serious. It was a tougher fight then, and it just ... always feels really unfair to me to blame people for getting angry at things they really have every right to be angry about, just because it's not as fun. Not that I think that that is all the third wave is about or that all third wavers have think that way. Just, yeah. Sometimes. Annoyed.
Blah blah blah. Why am I so old.
How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart
Yo Mamma" Hillary Clinton as the battleground in the war between mothers and daughters
NPR: Feminist Mother, Daughter Reconcile their Past
More Than a Mother-Daughter Debate
Mothertopia: "The ones who betray women the most are other women."
Girl on girl crime is ever so endlessly ironic.
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From:
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Personally, I just don't get it. Perhaps because my mum isn't a feminist. I don't really identify with either x_x
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That's sort of off the topic here, though. Not gonna lie, third-wave feminists can be really annoying.
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I think like we were talking about before, and what I meant by my "girl on girl crime" comment, is that it's kind of hard to navigate feminism without sometimes saying things that at least on the surface of things sounds anti-woman. I don't think it always is anti-woman, but you know, vicious cycle, it leads to that kind of irony.
It's funny because many of the things that third wave feminism says it stands for, I like, like the work/home balance and challenging the gender binary and intersectionalism. But yeah, sometimes it does bother me that it's a wave that kind of defines itself against another wave, though it would be wrong of me to put all the onus on third wave to integrate (though I still kinda think it makes more sense since it came after, but oh well, it's not like the second wave is dead). Yeah, I guess for all my sympathies, I still have an amount of ambivalence to things like reclaiming "bitch" though I can work around the various tactics (which is what's important) and I still think sometimes the third wave doesn't understand the second wave and ... yeah.
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And the third wavers often make totally ignorant comments about the second wavers.
And reclaiming "bitch"? PLEASE. That kind of thing makes me roll my eyes so hard.
*I don't see anything wrong or inherently patriarchal about lipstick, mind you, it's just not empowering either! It reminds me of that Onion article: "Woman Now Empowered By Everything Woman Does."
From:
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Which isn't to say that there won't be attention ho's of any gender in life in general, but in the context of the overall power balance, I am ambivalent at best about it.
I am sympathetic to reclaiming things, because if you've been called something all your life that you don't think is deserved, there are worse ways to deal than turning that negative into a positive that you don't have to feel ashamed of. At the same time, it can be misplaced ... IDK, like short shorts with "Bitch" or something written across in the ass in glitterysparkles.
I suppose it's most accurate to say that there's a certain third-wave related subculture that I don't care for, but it's important to not throw away the ideas that are useful too. Not least because that would be doing what they did to the second wave.
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I think my main frustration with the 3rd wave is that I'm a cynic. So I when I look at 3rd wavers, I can't help suspecting that their fundamental motivation is to show everyone how non-threatening and cool and hip and fun and they are. They're not man-hating killjoys, no sir! *eyeroll*
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But it's also irresponsible to let it balloon. It's a weird way to say it but I kind of want to say, admitting this is overly simplistic, that if you're going to be a social movement you have the responsibility to be rigorous. It's saying "We can only define ourselves by defining against something else" and I don't really like that. I suppose if there was a greater time period between movements then it wouldn't come off this way. Still, I kind of feel feminism shouldn't be about trends which is what I often feel when I'm immersed in third wave-ism, it's so trendy.
It's probably not fair entirely, but I know there are specific things I dislike. Especially "Y So Srs!" *ugh*
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Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but I feel very strongly that unless your mother has actually abused you, you don't write bitchy columns whining about how horrible and "fanatical" (!) she was. You certainly don't stake your claim to fame on your loud, public complaining about how neglected you were. That seems utterly classless to me. Actually, Walker (Rebecca) is so vicious that I think she's defeating her own purpose. I don't think it's just the fact that Alice Walker is one of my feminist heroines that makes me think her daughter is just making herself look bad by this bitching.
And blaming feminism for "denigrating men" (how? By not kissing their asses?) and "teaching women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families" (again, how? Your mother's perceived failings != what feminists tell people to do, you stupid fool).
If Walker is telling the truth about her mother, she ought to be thankful: her mother has guaranteed her a lucrative career as a feminist-basher. Those always get paid well. (Again, I'm a cynic!) I think the same about the other women who whine about how they felt "neglected" by their mothers' careers. Did they feel the same about their fathers' careers? My mother has a career and I'm very glad she does. I think she was a better mother for it. I did occasionally feel like my father wasn't making enough time for me, though. Even as a little kid I could see that my mother bent over backwards to make time for her kids, while my father (while loving) didn't make that kind of effort. (But I still wouldn't publicly name and shame him for it!) And in any case it's not lucrative to name and shame fathers for being neglectful. Prominent mothers, however...there's a neverending supply of media attention for the child of some famous woman, especially a feminist, complaining about what a bad mother she was.
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And that's what I think Walker's done here. After all, lots of people neglect 13-year-old girls without some sort of feminist belief that all women (including young girls) are to be treated equally as "sisters." Ditto for the girls having abortions on their own, and living on bad fast food. So why does R. Walker attribute her neglect to feminism? Did A. Walker say that's why she was doing it? I think R. Walker just assumed that it must be obvious that of course the bad mothering is due to feminism because of course feminists are just bad mothers. But it's not obvious at all, or warranted to draw that conclusion.
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I can also see parents in general putting careers too far above their children's needs, men and women both, but in the case of women, you know, it's not like men are expected to enable their wives to pursue careers by shouldering an equal burden of the home life, and because of things like that her attribution of the problem to feminism just plays out really problematically.
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Naturally mothers are just as capable of failing as fathers, but yeah I think it's true that mother issues just play differently than father issues in mass culture. And it's so annoying. *Geeky voice* Gloria Sez that because powerful women aren't seen as much outside of the context of childhood, when they're encountered they're seen as threatening because of infantilization. I think also, if your mother is your primary parent, you're just going to blame her more since she was around. I don't know, there was a phase in my teenage years where I would totally blame my mother more than my father (or stepfather, and in retrospect this is the total opposite of how I perceive the lot of them now), and I guess as a daughter part of that may have been I identified with her more and so blaming her reflected my own self-concept somehow. That's pertinent to female-female tensions, couldn't say what the deal is with disgruntled sons. Peter Pan?
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It's funny, I always thought of my mom as the Strict One and sort of blamed her for that...but at the same time, even when I was really little, I always had the vague sense that this was unfair. Like my mom was doing something that had to be done, even if it was no fun, and it wasn't right to be mad at her for it. When I got older I understood this feeling better.