Word: postfeminists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doesn't comically fracture his English and, though he occasionally loses his temper, never loses his quiet wit. There is about him a sort of watchful wariness, a thoughtful, insinuating manliness that avoids macho strutting in favor of bemused calculation. He is, in short, an absolute monarch for our postfeminist time. Cutting through the epic gesturings of Andy Tennant's direction, he provides reason enough to return one last time to this otherwise weary romance...
When it comes to more socially accepted sexual relations, Wallace cautiously leans toward nurture rather than nature. "Today's postfeminist era," he writes, "is also today's postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what's really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions...and so we're all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality." It sounds good on paper. But on the evidence in this strikingly original collection, it won't work between the sheets...
...most fussed-about young poet of the moment is Deborah Garrison, whose new collection, A Working Girl Can't Win, revolves around a quintessentially self-absorbed postfeminist. Again we get a picture of a career woman in her 20s who doesn't feel pretty enough and who fantasizes about life as a sexpot. "I'm never going to sleep/ with Martin Amis/ or anyone famous./ At twenty-one I scotched/my chance to be/one of the seductresses/of the century,/ a vamp on the rise through the ranks/ of literary Gods and military men,/ who wouldn't stop at the President...
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...
...London journalist Helen Fielding, Bridget is a bundle of frail funk, preoccupied by short skirts, long nails and yo-yo dieting. She has mother issues, toxic-married-men issues, smoking issues and VCR-programming issues. She affects irony, so you know she is deadly serious about her postfeminist problems--find a gym, find a guy, find a low-cal chocolate. If only she would find a life. And a brain...