Word: feminist
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Madonna too became a symbol in the '80s of a maturing feminism, at least in the eyes of flame-throwing author Camille Paglia, who considers herself a feminist. "Madonna has enabled the young women of the world to recover their sexuality and yet to remain assertive, independent beings," Paglia says. "She was able to fuse this overt and almost pornographic sexuality as a woman with this dominant, managerial aptitude. It has been an extraordinary influence on women...
More broadly, Faludi's feminist critics view her book as flawed and condescending because it treats women as victims, passively accepting what the culture imposes on them. Chicago Tribune columnist Joan Beck argued that "for all her feminist tenets, Faludi sells women short. The millions of women who are rethinking their full-time commitment to a job and are finding their primary satisfactions in family are, in her view, silly sheep being pushed back into the kitchen and the bedroom by men who want them to stay subordinate...
...movement cause feminism to fade away because it can't replenish its troops? Gloria Steinem says no. Young women have never provided feminism's shock troops, she says, and to assume otherwise reflects a male model of activism that has never applied to women. "I wasn't a feminist in my 20s either," she says. Where men tend to get more conservative as they get older, "it's always been the older women who are more radical than the younger women." Her reasoning is that young men have nothing to lose by being rebellious. "Women have more social power when...
...rejection of the label may, as Faludi argues, demonstrate the insidious effects of the backlash. But it may also reflect the failures of the movement. Paula Kamen, 24, author of Feminist Fatale, is a fan of Faludi's. But she urges that "in this age, the women's movement has to look in the mirror." Like some other critics, Kamen thinks that Backlash lets the women's movement off too easily. "It isn't all media conspiracy...
...myths and exposes hypocrisy has performed a useful service, and Faludi is no exception. She has inspired men and women to take a new look at the messages they absorb, messages that act as barriers to understanding or to justice. But it is also appropriate to argue, as founding feminist Betty Friedan does, that feminism also needs to "transcend sexual politics and anger against men to express a new vision of family and community. We must go from wallowing in the victim's state to mobilizing the new power of women and men for a larger political agenda...