Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut, author of Notes from the Cracked Ceiling, moderated a panel discussion recently on the evolving nature of feminism.  Kornblut opened the discussion with How often have we heard that feminism is dead?  Is it?

Syndicated newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker suggested the movement that demanded a certain way of thinking — one requiring every woman to sign on to a specific platform — is dead.  Once there was no longer any space for women who disagreed with that platform, the old feminism had run its course.   But feminism is far from dead;  it’s reincarnating in a different way.

Former McCain-Palin advisor Nicolle Wallace said there is no shared form of reference for what feminism means anymore.  Wallace discussed Sarah Palin’s responses to different questions that drew distinctions between ‘equality’ feminism and ‘reproductive rights/abortion’ feminism.

Those distinctions are important.  Equality unites women.  Abortion divides them, and it does so in extreme and unexpected ways.

One example that comes to mind is the Eve Ensler play, The Vagina Monologues.  If a man had written it and asked women to perform it, he’d probably have been labeled a sexual predator.  But a woman wrote it, marketed it the ‘bible for a new generation of women’, and abortion feminists embraced it.  Today the play is performed on hundreds of college campuses each February as the feminist alternative to Valentine’s Day.

From an equity perspective, The Vagina Monologues is the virtual antithesis of true feminism.  The play is vulgar, degrades women, condemns men, and glorifies sexual perversion (one act venerates child rape).   It depicts women as walking, screaming vaginas void of any intellect or abilities.   (If you haven’t seen the play, don’t waste your time.  Read the Vagina Monologues Exposed instead.)

That’s hardly the kind of “equity” women fought for a century to achieve.  In real life, smart women shun men whose behavior is guided by their penises (think Elin Woods).   In the world of Eve Ensler and abortion feminists, women are urged to let their vaginas guide their behavior.    

What’s so bizarre about Ensler’s play is that the old patriarchal culture — which abortion feminists abhor — could not have written a more male-driven fantasy role for women.   No doubt those old patriarchs would have cheered abortion-on-demand, too.  They could have enjoyed their fantasy lifestyle, while the women bore the physical and emotional scars that resulted from it.

Kornblut’s third panelist, former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, suggested that the old feminism became too tied to abortion and reproductive freedom.   

We’re redefining [feminism], but we’re still in the death throes of something.  Part of what made the ‘feminists’ — certain women — so crazy was … they said Sarah Palin can’t possibly be the beneficiary of the women’s movement because the women’s movement stands for reproductive freedom — a certain ideology. 

I think it raised this question we’re still resolving, which is, what is the women’s movement … feminism?  Is it an ideology, or is it the ability that all women have access to these opportunities?

More is more when it comes to women, and we should move beyond strict ideology, but we’re not quite there yet.

As women become better educated and more confident of their intellects and ability to compete, abortion will continue to lose ground to equity as the defining element of the women’s movement.   The sooner that process is complete, the better for all women.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.