“Snatched from the Jaws of Victory: Feminism Then and Now”
By PAULA ROTHENBERG
Exellent provocative piece from a second-wave feminist asking the basic question — have women been duped by a co-opted version of contemporary feminism?
“ … shouldn’t women be able to dress they way they want? The answer seems unambiguous. Of course they should. But first we need to create a world in which women are genuinely free to choose. Yes, retort those same young women, but isn’t wearing such a t-shirt a way of asserting one’s right to self-define and challenging the system? To this I answer that it can be, but the fashion choices that many women make today do not represent a challenge to patriarchy, let alone capitalism, instead, these “choices” reflect a total submission to those systems. We have come full circle. Girls and women now believe that they show how liberated they are by dressing like the ultimate male sex fantasy. Men used to have to go to adult sex shops to see women and girls dressed the way some of us dress to go to school and work every day.â€ÂÂ
…
“Once upon a time the personal really was political. Today, it is simply personal. Capitalist patriarchy has one again showed its extraordinary ability to take radical movements and demands that challenge the system, and re-package them in ways that actually reinforce that system and preserve the existing distribution of power and privilege in society. How convenient for capitalist patriarchy that young women today think that dressing like every man’s sex fantasy is a sign of their liberation and that the women’s movement was all about getting the right to choose and had nothing to do with making hard decisions about what values and what social vision should be reflected in our choices.”
…
“We have exchanged the possibility of genuine change for feminism light and designer water. And in the end, we know whose interest that serves.”
What are the implications of her argument — that false commodified “personal choices” subvert “political power” — for the men’s movement?
(Entire article link at ) –
http://www.counterpunch.org/rothenberg05092007.html

