Word: feminist
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...sense view that spending time with worthy male mentors is a good thing. But his eerie near dismissal of mothers gets in the way of his often sensible argument and devolves on occasion into a paranoia about a world dominated by manipulative women. He calls Gloria Steinem a "victim" feminist. Women, he says, do not see "how neglected their emotionally disadvantaged adolescent sons feel" as a result of women's lack of interest "in male biology and thus its forgetfulness of the subtleties of the male soul...
Even those feminists who don't necessarily embrace Paglia's world view seem to have inherited the postfeminist tic of offering up autobiography as theory. A 1995 anthology of young feminist thought, To Be Real, compiled by Rebecca Walker, is a collection of airy--sometimes even ludicrous--mini-memoirs meant to expand our understanding of female experience. She introduces the material by explaining that she first felt guilty about putting together such an introspective, apolitical book. But, Walker says, she resisted the pressure "to make a book I really wasn't all that desperate to read." An essay by Veena...
...Feminist author Naomi Wolf's most recent book, 1997's Promiscuities, draws on what she and her friends experienced growing up to make the point that female longing is dangerously suppressed in our culture. She argues that the world would be a better place if we celebrated women's sexuality the way so many ancient peoples did. "Confucius, in his Book of Rites," she writes, "held that it was a husband's duty to take care of his wife or concubine sexually as well as financially and emotionally." It seems to have eluded Wolf that ancient Chinese women might have...
...Alanis Morissette are installed as icons of woman power (alongside real artist-activists like Tori Amos) simply because they sing about bad moods or boyfriends who have dumped them. In the late '60s, when the label was applied more sparingly, no one thought to call Nancy Sinatra a feminist, and yet if she recorded These Boots Are Made for Walkin' in 1998, she'd probably find herself headlining the Lilith Fair...
...impact is that it often focused on the issue of childhood sexual abuse. Not only did the songs relate harrowing personal experiences but the band members started 'zines and websites through which teenagers who had been molested could communicate with one another. Riot Grrrl's concerns paralleled those of feminists in the grownup world who, around the same time, also became preoccupied with sexual abuse and self-help (even Steinem got in on the act with her 1992 book, Revolution from Within). But many of those grownups, who called themselves feminist therapists, ended up attaching themselves to the bizarre fringes...