Some babbling after a few midnight conversations with mothertopia

[misstopia]

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.

Comments

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the problem with "third wave" for me is that its implicit premise is "the second wave is just so grumpy and cranky and racist" (even though the "third wave" seems, to me, to be predominantly white middle-class girls who want to pretend that lipstick is empowering*).

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."

[misstopia.livejournal.com]

I can understand "championing" of things that were denigrated for no reason, I understand the backlash that happens and am sympathetic too (because it is true, for example, that if you're attractive or present yourself attractively you're presumed to be stupid, etc) ... but there is a certain face of the third wave that is really offputting. Maybe it's a strawman to call it the face of third wave feminism (probably not just "maybe", but "surely"), but while I get the idea that if guys are allowed to be, IDK, debauched and exhibitionist (though I don't think gaze works the same for guys and gals) and shallow, girls should be too, I don't know that the glamorization of all that sits well with me. Like we've been talking about, it's still looking for approval through male attention.

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.

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

It's not that I think reclaiming can't happen--see what gay people have done with "queer," for example. But I think if you reclaim you have to actually do it in earnest, in a united sort of way, and I don't see that happening. If you reclaim a word then you should, for instance, stop using it as an insult.