Vote of Confidence

The Feminist Majority Foundation website drew my attention to a new study conducted by the Girl Scout Research Institute showing an increase in political awareness, confidence, and engagement among girls ages 13-17 since the last time similar data was gathered, before the 2008 election cycle heated up. Fifty nine percent of the study’s 3, 284 female respondents stated that the election increased their confidence in being able to achieve their goals in the future and 55 percent said it increased their confidence levels in speaking and expressing their opinions on issues that matter to them. Also, according to the survey, both boys and girls showed substantially higher awareness of the difficulties and inequities faced by women in our society, with 43 percent agreeing with the statement that “girls have to work harder than boys in order to gain positions of leadership” compared with similar data gathered a year ago in which only 25 percent agreed with the same statement. Instead of being deterred by this heightened awareness of gender inequalities, however, four in ten young women surveyed stated that this election has had a positive impact on their desire to become a leader. 

I realize that data gathered through small-scale surveys of this type needs to be approached with healthy skepticism, particularly when the data-gathering organization is an affiliate of the Girl Scouts, an organization with a history of explicitly religious affiliations and ambiguous stances on homosexuality and other issues. That said, these findings make sense to me intuitively.

It’s long been with a sense of sadness, frustration, and sometimes embarrassment that I’ve witnessed the political and social apathy of women around me, in the media and in my circle of friends and acquaintances. This video, put out by  MobLogic.TV last year made a real impact on me because those types of reactions have grown so familiar to me. Of course, every person is not naturally interested in or engaged with politics, and that’s fine. But my experiences have shown a real disparity along gender lines. When I stop to really think about it, though, it’s totally understandable. It’s is pretty difficult to feel a sense of investment, engagement, or interest in a system that ignores and frequently disrespects your interests, a society in which the prevailing, respected voices in the media are still overwhelmingly male, in which many of the issues that most deeply effect women are trivialized, ignored, or dictated by legislative bodies which still consist predominantly of old, white men. After all, even today when there are more women in politics than ever before, only 17 out of 100 US Senators are women, as well as 74 out of 535 members of Congress and one out of nine Supreme Court justices. Shockingly, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which would provide comprehensive protection against gender discrimination, has still not been ratified, despite numerous attempts since it was first proposed in 1923 (as in, 86 years ago). In light of all of this and in the face of overwhelming daily reminders of our second-class status within our society, it is not hard to understand why it would be easy for women to feel disenfranchised and altogether disengaged from political and social issues and processes. 

The past year or two have provided much reason to be hopeful for the future and I think this survey provides concrete evidence of what many of us, whether we are women, African American, or neither, have been feeling. This election cycle represented many firsts and above all proved that, after the initial uncertainty and ad infinitum rehashing of whether America was “ready” for a black or woman President died down, a non-white or non-male candidate could be a legitimate candidate who, though not entirely escaping prejudices and double standards, would be judged above all on substance, on the issues. Furthermore, I believe that Obama’s victory is a victory for women in ways that extend beyond his feminist stances on issues like abortion, birth control, and poverty. Indeed, I believe that simply by breaking the mold, expanding the vision of what a President looks like, Obama’s presidency will help move us toward the election of a woman president, something I hope can be accomplished in the near future. 

Much has been made of the significance of Obama’s win. It has been written about and discussed as a historic milestone, and indeed it is. Yet, we must not allow smug self-congratulation to make us complacent. Yes, we have a black president, yes we had a viable woman candidate, but there is still only one black person in the United States Senate, and only 17 women. And writing about the House of Representatives’ 39 African American members recently, FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver pointed out that most of these representatives were elected in districts in which African Americans represented more than 50 percent of voters.

None of this is meant to diminish the kind of deserved increase in political and civic interest and engagement by women, African Americans or other historically disenfranchised groups represented by these new statistics. Indeed, this is exactly what is necessary in order to continue to push toward a more equal future. My only reason for returning to these sobering statistics is to urge continued vigilance and to suggest that, though an important foundation, enthusiasm and engagement on their own are not enough to enact change. Just as many have cautioned in the months since election day that we should not take Obama’s election as proof of the achievement of a “colorblind” society and be lulled into a false sense that our work in this department is over, I believe that it is important to recognize that greater optimism is only significant if it is justified, followed through in concrete ways. We are far from a gender-neutral or gender-equal society and if this newly energized, excited, and engaged generation of young girls is to find justification for these feelings, we must all work, starting today, to create a society which fosters not only optimism but the opportunities for these young women to channel this increased enthusiasm into concrete action and change.

Belles, Bridezillas, and Bulging Brides

In the days following the ratification of Proposition 8, inundated with “sanctity of marriage” rhetoric from the Christian right, I’ve been thinking a lot about the institution of marriage. But as Christmas approaches, in this season of rampant consumerism and good cheer, I’ve been thinking about something related to, but strangely detached from, marriages–weddings. And not just weddings, but the wedding industry, the wedding EMPIRE . I’m not anti-marriage and I’m not anti-wedding–I hope to get married some day and I don’t think I’ll probably want to just go down to city hall for a license either. But as an intelligent, independent woman, I can’t claim there aren’t a lot of things about not only the institution of marriage but the cultural canonization of weddings, be it in movies, magazines, reality TV or pervading the public discourse, that are troubling to me, or which I feel ambivalent about.

At the basic level, weddings are steeped in anti-feminist symbolism, from the virginal veil-and-all-white look to the exchange of “goods” that is represented by being given away by one’s father to one’s husband, handed off from one man to another. It’s hard, on this level, to reconcile the part of me that finds myself enamored on some level by these traditional trappings, the pomp and circumstance, the romance of it all, and the part of me that doesn’t want to partake in upholding such antiquated values which are in fundamental opposition to my sense of self and of the world around me. I think that’s a hard line for many intelligent, modern, empowered women to walk, in arenas extending far beyond the matrimonial as well. It doesn’t mean we don’t believe in embodying feminism in our lives, it simply means that life is not black and white and also that it can be very hard not to be sucked up in believing we want the things that we are told every day of our lives, from the time we are children, we must want, should want.

This is perhaps what I resent most about wedding culture, what I feel most uncomfortable about–having desires jammed down my throat, expectations foisted upon me. Not every girl dreams of her wedding day starting at age six. I sure didn’t and frankly I hope there aren’t too many six year olds who are dreaming about their weddings. There seems to be a little conflation between “bride” and “fairy princess” going on. It’s perfectly legitimate for a woman to want to feel beautiful, to want to have a special, even “magical” day to celebrate her love with the people she cares about. But to look at the media of matrimony, one would think that the wedding day is more important than the marriage itself. So often, I’ve heard the wedding day referred to as the “most important” or “best” day in a woman’s life. I hope not. Not only that, but the archetypes of womanhood represented by wedding culture are so often silly, frivolous, materialistic, vain, small minded, and frankly pathetic. The bar has been set so ridiculously high that people go into massive debt funding elaborate weddings and buying designer dresses. Women torture themselves to lose weight, to become, literally and not just figuratively that long-imagined fairy princess. Exhibit A: some plastic surgeons actually have Bridal Plastic Surgery packages. These impulses are not some innate part of the female genetic makeup, something I think is too often forgotten. They’re trained and reinforced through a lifetime of cultural cues, overt and covert.

Shows like Bridezillas and Bulging Brides reiterate and reinforce these kinds of stereotypes and expectations . Bridezillas is based around the concept of how ridiculously silly and downright insane women get, pushed over the edge by their compulsive attempts to engineer a “perfect” wedding, with much cat fighting, hyperventilation, crying, and expletives involved. Bulging Brides has the absolutely sickening premise of having brides-to-be buy dresses several sizes too small for them and then work out and diet constantly in the desperate attempt to squeeze into the smaller dress by their wedding day. There are so many other shows based around weddings and brides (with names like ”Engaged and Underage,” “Til Death,” “Wedding SOS”), I won’t even try to list them all. Check out Sarah Haskins‘ as usual hilarious take on this phenomenon. Talking about the large number of wedding-focused shows on the WE television network, she says “They put the ‘WE’ in ‘wedding’ and the ‘end’ in ‘feminism.’”

In terms of other forms of media, it’s crazy to me that a whole genre of wedding-themed magazines continues to appear to prosper even as magazines are going under everywhere you look and even such institutions as Rolling Stone are downsizing. And then, of course, there is Hollywood, which gives us crazy/neurotic bride movies and cute/sweet bride movies and movies where weddings are big and fat and Greek and hillarious. I’m not saying any of this is new. If anyone should be aware of the long and illustrious tradition of idealizing weddings, it’s a Jane Austen fan like me. An Austen story wasn’t over until there was a LEAST one marriage, if you were lucky two (although, back then could you really blame them for rushing to the altar? You could barely even kiss on the lips before marriage, and hand-kissing will only get you so far. Come to think of it, for a lot of people things haven’t changed much in that regard, I guess. No wonder evangelicals marry younger. But I digress). But I guess my thinking is, back then women couldn’t show their ankles and spent most of their time playing the piano-forte and doing needlepoint. They didn’t go to college, couldn’t play sports (besides croquette) and had a habit of fainting as a result of their restrictive corsets. In two and a half centuries, a lot has changed for the better for women. But some things haven’t. We’re still conditioned to be just as wedding-crazed as ever (and we still love a game of croquette once in a while–but there’s nothing wrong with that!). 

I’m not saying women shouldn’t have the right to be excited about their wedding day, to put work into making it what they want it to be. But a modicum of perspective would be nice. Maybe I’m totally off base here, but this reminds me of something Naomi Wolf wrote about in The Beauty Myth. She wrote about the way that dieting in a patriarchal society serves the function of keeping women’s minds frivolously absorbed and thus significantly lessening the threat of them exerting their power, intelligence, and influence in the public arena in ways that might actually challenge the male-dominated status quo. This isn’t meant as an all-inclusive explanation for anything. I don’t think anyone would argue that things like dieting or being a shopaholic or becoming a bridezilla are the reasons patriarchal values persist, but I do believe they represent part of the bigger picture. All of us get wrapped up in capitalist-driven, self-absorbed triviality sometimes. But, increasingly our society, but I think women in particular, as in these examples, are being encouraged to embrace these impulses by those who stand to gain from them.

The Tipping Point?

Apropos of nothing: Why is mainstream media so obsessed with giving every issue and topic its own special catch phrase and graphic?

Tina Brown’s newest project, the news blog The Daily Beast, today published the findings of a poll they conducted post-election looking at a broad array of issues pertaining to attitudes and opinions about women, politics, and the media. The poll, conducted with a group of 1000 men and women voters from across the political spectrum, reflects a lot of interesting disparities between the attitudes and beliefs of women and men as well as between younger and older women about whether and to what extent women face unequal treatment, particularly in the media. It also explored attitudes about women in power and their abilities to provide effective leadership, compared to men.

The official report of the findings, entitled  The Barrier That Didn’t Fall , does not break down the results along gender or other demographic lines, which is unfortunate because many of the most interesting findings have to do with the gaps that appear to exist between men’s and women’s perceptions of these issues. Fortunately, The Daily Beast included some of these results in their write-up of the poll results.

The study found that the women polled overwhelmingly felt that women receive unfair treatment by the media as well as in politics, in the workplace and in the armed forces. In fact, 61% of women agreed with the idea that there is a gender bias in the media, compared to only 19% who did not and fully 72% agreed that women were being treated unfairly in politics. Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama were all considered role models by the women in the survey and a whopping 85% agreed that a female President would bring valuable qualities to the office that most male candidates lack, rejecting the notion of women as too weak to effectively govern. Finally, 70% of women contended that candidates’ physical appearances and attributes are not a legitimate topic of discussion.

Several interesting facts complicate these numbers. First of all, older women seemed to feel more strongly about gender disparities and media treatment of women, including women in politics, than did younger women. This is not a huge surprise to me, though I continue to find it frustrating and at least somewhat counterintuitive. While I was at NOW last year, I had many discussions with people about the generational divisions within the feminist movement, and even witnessed the phenomenon firsthand, to a limited extent. I think  a lot of second-wave feminists still tend to understand women’s activism through the lens of the movement as it was in the ’60’s and ’70’s, and feel in some sense that the younger generation of feminists, my generation, take for granted many of the things for which they worked so hard. Meanwhile, younger feminists sometimes look at these older guard of feminists as out of touch with the current realities and issues emerging and reshaping the movement and the new avenues through which activism in the 21st century often occurs. I think part of the issue has to do with this changing face of activism– what it means to be an activist, how one asserts their views and opinions in a constructive way and how a social movement enacts change most effectively. So, while I think there is some element of apathy in many young people today (as there is, I think, with every generation), which is reflected in this survey and should certainly be actively worked on and counteracted, it seems to me that it’s often greatly over-emphasized or misunderstood. I think there is some amount of mutual generational misunderstanding that manifests itself in feminist activism and ends up being a divisional and counterproductive force within the movement.

Speaking of feminist activism, perhaps the most shocking (to me) statistic the poll results presented, though it probably shouldn’t have been, was the fact that only 20% of women surveyed would describe themselves as feminists. Even more shocking, only 17% would want a daughter to consider herself a feminist. Wow. I don’t really understand what it is about that little word that scares people in this country so intensely, but it does. Pat Robertson said at the 1992 Republican Convention, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians” and this archetype seems to be so deeply ingrained that even women whose lives exemplify the ideals of feminism often resist the label. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a woman say “I believe in women’s equality, but I’m not a feminist.”

Another disturbing set of findings of the poll were the disparities between men’s and women’s attitudes toward these issues. The men in the survey rejected the notion that a media bias against women existed, though they agreed that gender biases do exist in the realms of politics and the workplace. 40% of the men surveyed openly admitted to feeling sexist attitudes toward the idea of a woman President with about the same percentage contending that a male is “naturally more suited” to carrying out the duties of the highest office. There was also some disparity between women’s and men’s perceptions of equality in the home. While there was a more or less even split among women on whether they thought women in the US were treated equally in the home, the men surveyed contended by a 2/1 margin that no gender inequality existed in the home.

This poll presents so much raw data, it’s a little difficult to draw a single cohesive conclusion from it. But I agree with The Daily Beast’s analysis that the overwhelmingly negative and frustrated attitudes of the women in the survey towards the treatment of women in the media and politics as well as in the workplace, the military, and to some extent even in the home, suggests the potential for a revitalization of the women’s equality movement. I felt that kind of energy building tremendously during Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in a way I’ve never before felt so manifestly in my lifetime and while there were some that felt disillusioned by her loss of the nomination, I don’t think that energy I felt just vanished with Clinton’s capitulation. I don’t think it will by any means be a quick or straightforward process to give widespread, cohesive form to the broad frustrations expressed by the women in this survey, or to channel these feelings into constructive action, but I do believe that now is a crucial moment to try to do so. To put it in the most trite way possible, organizations and movements of reform and change need to strike while the iron is hot, while the treatment of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin is still fresh in people’s minds and while these issues still have people fired up and ready for change.