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slemslempike"My husband has a badge that he picked up from the Fawcett Society, an organisation that promotes equality between men and women. It says 'real men are feminists'. I love him for having it - maybe that's why he got it in the first place - but I'd probably be embarrassed if he wore it in public."
I hated this book.
Some of you may have seen Ellie Levenson's post on the f-word, where she says that in-fighting harms feminism, and we should all just get along. (She also says that she's deliberately baited other feminists with whom she disagrees in order to get publicity for her book, but apparently we shouldn't let that bother us.) Someone in the comments (the comments are great, you should read them if you haven't yet) pointed out that her entire post reads like an attempt to pre-emptively stall any criticism of her book. If I'd written this book I'd be frantically trying to raise the shields too - if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be "facile". But I don't have to sum it up in one word, so I've written five thousand. (Don't judge me - I've had a lot of work to not do this week.)
The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism is written to try and make all women call themselves feminists. However, I don't know why Levenson wants women to call themselves feminists - in order to make feminism palatable to her imagined audience, she strips it of all meaning. Feminism is "what you want it to be", and any choice is a feminist choice as long as you think it's okay. She does have some understanding of material inequalities, talking about the pay gap and a few other things, but she doesn't really talk about how these come to be, so there's no analysis of what might be the causes. It's a bit like the cargo cult*1 thing - she sees the problems, but misses out large stages, so she thinks it will be solved if everyone calls themselves feminist. She is at great pains to say that you don't have to think anything in particular to be a feminist, you don't, in fact, have to think at all *2.
This is not an academic book, and it is not intended to be. I realise this, and my criticism is not based on the fact that it isn't something that it doesn't set out to be in the first place. So when I say the book is full of unfounded assertions, I am not quibbling that the Harvard references are incorrectly formatted, or that Levenson hasn't used Judith Butler as a theoretical underpinning, or that frankly anything that doesn't cite Deleuze isn't worth bothering over. I am saying that her sources are mostly "as a friend of mine said", or, more often, an anecdote from her own life that she doesn't really bother to relate properly to wider issues, so that the portion of the book about the use of "cunt" boils down to "my boyfriend and I have an in-joke where he calls me a cunt and I don't mind" (paraphrase). Seriously, that's what she concludes.
I sort of don't care whether or not people call themselves feminists. I really like it when people are feminists, but I don't try to convert people. I just correct misapprehensions about feminism, (try to) challenge what I see as problematic behaviour, and leave them to come to their own conclusions. Sometimes this is increased alignment with feminism, sometimes not. Whatever, frankly. This is the opposite view to this book, which is at pains not to challenge behaviour, actively promotes stereotypes about (other) feminists, and is insistent that everyone is a feminist. (Kind of like Sars' essay at Tomato Nation, only even more annoying.)
This book is not aimed at me, I do realise that. Like Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism (which I also dislike, though reading this makes me want to write her a grovelling fan-letter with the newfound realisation of how much worse it could have been), Noughtie (I really can't be bothered to type it out over and over, and in any case, this simpering omg-it-sounds-like-naughty! name is really all you need) is written for (young) women who aren't feminists, who are put off by the very thought of feminism. Valenti and Levenson both want to do something to counteract the negative media images of feminists. But, like many others they do so by accepting those stereotypes as negative, but pinning them on "other", older forms of feminism.
This is not a terribly coherent post, I'm afraid. It is, however, quite long. Sorry about that. Frankly, I could open the book at a random page and find something that makes me cross, so I am trying to restrain myself to only posting the "highlights".
Noughtie opens with a women's magazine style quiz, where the questions about scenarios such as going to dinner with a man, contraception, whether or not your five year old daughter can paint her room pink, in order to determine whether or not you are a noughtie girl. (You know, the really important details in women's lives.) You work out whether your answers are mostly:
You might think from this that it is clear that the 'c's are the noughtie girls. But you'd be wrong! We are ALL noughtie girls. WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT. So this is a book for everyone, right? Well, no. In the introduction, Levenson explains that she simply cannot be expected to think about things that aren't directly related to her own experience. (I am exaggerating. Slightly.)
It's heavily skewed towards upper/middle class women (though she does - briefly - mention the proliferation of women in low-status, ill-paid jobs in the chapter on work). You might be thinking that this all sounds suspiciously like it's about white British women. But at careful intervals she sprinkles offhand references to racism (but mostly no details other than that she is aware of its existence), and there's a whole section called "What about foreign women?" Well, where to start. They're victims, obviously, completely oppressed in ways we can't really understand, lucky as we all are to live in a much more enlightened culture.
In the first chapter, there is a section called "Crying she-wolf, or how to recognise discrimination". I'm going to quote quite a long passage.
Apparently Ellie Levenson used to do stand-up (she says she gave it up in part because she has a husband now and doesn't need the attention from strangers any more - no, I'm not joking (but if I were it would be funnier than the hack jokes she gives as examples of her act)), and as such she is an expert on rape jokes, and she finds them funny so anyone making a fuss just doesn't get it and is a prude who doesn't understand that there are REAL problems that they could be focusing on instead.
I see a fair amount of stand-up, and some of that includes rape jokes. (Substantially less than many people's experiences, I imagine, because I mostly see full-length sets from fairly lefty comedians, but it's a fairly common topic in UK comedy.) Occasionally these jokes can be funny, and astute. More often than not they are simply there for shock value. I sort of want to write that these jokes simply bore me, because I am not immune to the pressure not to undermine the all-new accepting happy feminism by carping on, but they don't actual bore me, they annoy me, and make me feel like shit a lot of the time. I do not think that rape itself is off-limits for comedy. There's a line that gets trotted out, and I'm afraid I don't know if there's an actual originator to whom it should be attributed, about there not being taboo subjects in comedy, only taboo approaches. So a joke about rape is not inherently anti-feminist, but when a large proportion of jokes about rape are simply there to make the teller seem "edgy", and often rely on acceptance of myths about rape, that's fucking anti-feminist. But in Noughtie, Levenson doesn't think about this at all, just claims that you shouldn't be upset by rape jokes because they're only jokes
But then Levenson's going for a version of "edgy" herself. Many of her chapter sections have provocative titles like "Why most women bosses are shits". This section is one of the bits supported by evidence from "a man I know" - who says he doesn't ever want to work for a woman boss again. "To many feminists this is an outrageous statement. To me it is an outrageous statement. Other than the fact that I am inclined to agree with him. Women bosses can be absolute terrors." She then backtracks slightly to say of course she doesn't mean all women, and it's sexist to extrapolate from one bad female boss. But the section isn't about that, it's about accepting the "fact" that women bosses are awful. It's once more back to the idea that feminists make a fuss about nothing some of the time, but she's not like that, she's not the humourless feminist who says it's not okay, not wanting to be the fun police, not wanting to rock the boat. She's a cool, noughties girl!
In the section "Should brains always be valued over beauty?", she asks "What is it about our society that means we should value those who are born with good brains more than those born with good looks?" To be honest, I'm not sure that society does do that. Furthermore, her book devotes far more attention to what people look like than what they think (think anything! or not at all! it's all feminist if you say it is!). Like most people who try to clean up feminism in order to make it more palatable (and less potent), she is concerned with body hair – she returns more than once to reassure the reader that you don't have to have hairy legs or armpits to be a feminist. Again, old feminism is presented as a tyrannical monolith sweeping through women's lives and snatching the razors and creams from their very hands.
I am more than slightly biased here, in that I am a hairy feminist (sorry, I should have said this upfront so that you could immediately discount my crazed despotic ramblings), and there is frankly no shortage of people telling me it is okay for me to remove my hair, that I am a better, more likeable person for doing so, and pretty much the only validation I get for my choice not to is other feminists. She does write about how much time and effort it takes for women to remove their body hair, and how much expectation there is that this is done. But rather than say that there is possibility for resistance, that feminism tries to enable this resistance, she writes:
One of the more confused parts of her book (Levenson would doubtless say that it's part of the wonderful contradictions of being a Noughtie girl, but she's wrong), is the inconsistencies in her attitudes to men. She constantly trots out the stereotype of man-hating feminists of yore, and goes for a very anti-separatist approach (not criticising that). She ponders what a modern men's movement would look like. Apparently:
But then she also wants certain parts of what you might term female culture to stay single-sex. She doesn't want unisex toilets (despite approving of the theory) because she wouldn't feel comfortable asking another woman for a tampon there
But then Levenson thinks that one of the problems of eventual equality, yes, PROBLEMS, is that men might want to stay at home with the children.
In Noughtie she is very defensive about relationships with men, but assumes that all women either have them or want them, and this is certainly something that "just is" and no-one should think about how that might come to be. Some of you probably have female friends. Have you ever thought about why? You might think that it's because you like them. Levenson continues her streak of knowing nothing about history by claiming that single sex friendship groups like Sex and the City (of course like SatC, what else would she cite) are new.
One of Levenson's "controversial" points that she made in her f-word post, and is also in the book, is that she thinks that you shouldn't allow a man to take you to dinner if you're not going to sleep with him. This may seem contradictory, when her opening quiz suggested that only a crazed feminazi would object to a man insisting on paying. It also contradicts a point in her final chapter (where she finally gets around to talking about action instead of merely calling yourself a feminist), when she says that you should pay your way when you are taken out for dinner in order to act as a feminist. However, she is careful to insist that noughties girls are by their nature contradictory, so we're not allowed to criticise her on that point. Or any point. Stop crying she-wolf, h8ers!
I should point out that the very last chapter of the book is "Forward Feminism", where activism is actually suggested. These are mostly, again, very individualistic options (and, in some cases, contradict what she's been saying in the rest of the book). But, in fairness, she does try to suggest somewhere to go with feminism once she's redefined it almost out of existence. And that's what most frustrates me with this book. It's the first UK based popular feminist book of its kind since 1999 (when Natasha Walter's The New Feminism was published), and it covers important topics, and could have been used to help young women work out what they want from life, and how and if feminism was something that could be a useful tool. But it doesn't. And I feel, somewhat irrationally, perhaps, betrayed.
The standard response to any criticism is "well, why don't you do better". For a start, I don't think that I could write a particularly good book about feminism for young women, and in any case, I procrastinate enough already. But more than that, I think that this is the only sort of book about feminism that would get published and marketed widely (it seems to be in a promotion in Waterstones). I do not think that there is a huge secret conspiracy against feminism(I think it's out in the open), but, as I understand it, people publish books that will make them money. It is easier to sell a book that is utterly unchallenging, that dismisses a political position that the media already finds distasteful, that promotes rather than dismantles stereotypes, and that may as well be a generic women's magazine. I won't quite go as far as saying that I would rather give a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid, but I do think that this book is not helping anyone.
*1 I was concerned about using this as a reference, because I think it gets brought into discussions in ways that are distinctly dodgy, but then I realised that as if I, as a feminist, decide that the choice I want is to use it, then it is ergo a feminist choice!!!
*2 I think that there is a great deal of pressure on young women to work on themselves, to act in certain ways and to achieve (there's lots about this in girlhood studies - Anita Harris's work is excellent), and that feminism can be a contributing factor to these pressures. But there is ALSO pressure not to criticise things, especially as a feminist, and Levenson pays no attention to this.
I hated this book.
Some of you may have seen Ellie Levenson's post on the f-word, where she says that in-fighting harms feminism, and we should all just get along. (She also says that she's deliberately baited other feminists with whom she disagrees in order to get publicity for her book, but apparently we shouldn't let that bother us.) Someone in the comments (the comments are great, you should read them if you haven't yet) pointed out that her entire post reads like an attempt to pre-emptively stall any criticism of her book. If I'd written this book I'd be frantically trying to raise the shields too - if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be "facile". But I don't have to sum it up in one word, so I've written five thousand. (Don't judge me - I've had a lot of work to not do this week.)
The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism is written to try and make all women call themselves feminists. However, I don't know why Levenson wants women to call themselves feminists - in order to make feminism palatable to her imagined audience, she strips it of all meaning. Feminism is "what you want it to be", and any choice is a feminist choice as long as you think it's okay. She does have some understanding of material inequalities, talking about the pay gap and a few other things, but she doesn't really talk about how these come to be, so there's no analysis of what might be the causes. It's a bit like the cargo cult*1 thing - she sees the problems, but misses out large stages, so she thinks it will be solved if everyone calls themselves feminist. She is at great pains to say that you don't have to think anything in particular to be a feminist, you don't, in fact, have to think at all *2.
This is not an academic book, and it is not intended to be. I realise this, and my criticism is not based on the fact that it isn't something that it doesn't set out to be in the first place. So when I say the book is full of unfounded assertions, I am not quibbling that the Harvard references are incorrectly formatted, or that Levenson hasn't used Judith Butler as a theoretical underpinning, or that frankly anything that doesn't cite Deleuze isn't worth bothering over. I am saying that her sources are mostly "as a friend of mine said", or, more often, an anecdote from her own life that she doesn't really bother to relate properly to wider issues, so that the portion of the book about the use of "cunt" boils down to "my boyfriend and I have an in-joke where he calls me a cunt and I don't mind" (paraphrase). Seriously, that's what she concludes.
I sort of don't care whether or not people call themselves feminists. I really like it when people are feminists, but I don't try to convert people. I just correct misapprehensions about feminism, (try to) challenge what I see as problematic behaviour, and leave them to come to their own conclusions. Sometimes this is increased alignment with feminism, sometimes not. Whatever, frankly. This is the opposite view to this book, which is at pains not to challenge behaviour, actively promotes stereotypes about (other) feminists, and is insistent that everyone is a feminist. (Kind of like Sars' essay at Tomato Nation, only even more annoying.)
This book is not aimed at me, I do realise that. Like Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism (which I also dislike, though reading this makes me want to write her a grovelling fan-letter with the newfound realisation of how much worse it could have been), Noughtie (I really can't be bothered to type it out over and over, and in any case, this simpering omg-it-sounds-like-naughty! name is really all you need) is written for (young) women who aren't feminists, who are put off by the very thought of feminism. Valenti and Levenson both want to do something to counteract the negative media images of feminists. But, like many others they do so by accepting those stereotypes as negative, but pinning them on "other", older forms of feminism.
This is not a terribly coherent post, I'm afraid. It is, however, quite long. Sorry about that. Frankly, I could open the book at a random page and find something that makes me cross, so I am trying to restrain myself to only posting the "highlights".
Noughtie opens with a women's magazine style quiz, where the questions about scenarios such as going to dinner with a man, contraception, whether or not your five year old daughter can paint her room pink, in order to determine whether or not you are a noughtie girl. (You know, the really important details in women's lives.) You work out whether your answers are mostly:
- 'a's (stereotypical traditional femininity - on the pink question, you "say you don't really think pink is girly enough and suggest she add glitter and flower stencils to the wishlist and by the way, doesn't she think she's old enough to start wearing make-up now?"),
- 'b's (stereotypical irrational manhater - when a man asks to take you to dinner, you "offer to pay half, and when he refuses throw your coffee over him and yell 'There's no need for misogyny you bastard' before storming out"), or
- 'c's (all new modern woman full of contradictions and consideration - when your boyfriend asks if you want to think about getting married, you "take time out to think about whether this is a future you want, and then do whatever feels right for you").
You might think from this that it is clear that the 'c's are the noughtie girls. But you'd be wrong! We are ALL noughtie girls. WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT. So this is a book for everyone, right? Well, no. In the introduction, Levenson explains that she simply cannot be expected to think about things that aren't directly related to her own experience. (I am exaggerating. Slightly.)
A note however on women who are lesbians. Sexuality is often lumped in with other gender issues, in bookshops and on university courses at least. In part this is because the two issues became bound together in previous incarnations of feminism, where having sex with men was seen as betraying the sisterhood and lesbianism was as much a political statement as an expression of your true sexuality. This is not the case among noughtie girls, who tend to see lesbianism as an instinctive sexuality rather than as a political choice. But as I have no direct experience of many of the issues specifically concerning lesbians I have not attempted to cover these here. Therefore the chapters on sex and on marriage are about heterosexual relationships. Other than that however I hope that this book is interesting for all women.Leaving aside for a moment that I question the interest of the book for any woman, the heteronormativity seeps throughout the entire book. The chapter on children is mostly about male partners, as is the chapter called "How not to be a domestic goddess". It's pretty clear that Levenson doesn't quite understand that sexuality and gender aren't just "lumped in" together, but can be seen to be all tangled up in each other. Still. Other than lesbians, who can just consider themselves lucky it's only sex and relationships that she explicitly excludes them from, the book's for all women, yes? Well, no. That's just the only exclusion that Levenson bothers to note.
It's heavily skewed towards upper/middle class women (though she does - briefly - mention the proliferation of women in low-status, ill-paid jobs in the chapter on work). You might be thinking that this all sounds suspiciously like it's about white British women. But at careful intervals she sprinkles offhand references to racism (but mostly no details other than that she is aware of its existence), and there's a whole section called "What about foreign women?" Well, where to start. They're victims, obviously, completely oppressed in ways we can't really understand, lucky as we all are to live in a much more enlightened culture.
In some senses, Western women are very lucky. We aren't on the whole, honour killed. Our genitals are not mutilated as they are in countries that practise female circumcision. We can own property. We can vote. We can afford sanitary towels or tampons.So that's nice. Her grasp of feminist history/activism is not always very clear. I don't think that she should have an understanding or interest in academic feminist theory, or have intimate knowledge of the specifics of feminist history, but there are several fairly basic points that I think are misunderstood.
- In the introduction, she tells us that she wrote an article, and was asked to include some quotes from second wave feminists. She didn't know any second wave feminists, so she went to Wikipedia and found a list. Then she spoke to someone on the list, who didn't know whether or not she would call herself a second wave feminist. Levenson's conclusion? "so much for feminist history". Not "so much for Wikipedia's accuracy" (oh yeah, she's a LECTURER IN JOURNALISM), not "so much for arbitrary distinctions of feminist history", not "hey, maybe it's all more complicated", no. "SO MUCH FOR FEMINIST HISTORY".
- Levenson says that the women's liberation slogan "I don't want equality with men; I was hoping for something better" is about saying that women are better than men, which I don't think is the intent at all. Rather, it's about saying that men don't enjoy a particularly free life either, and that feminist goals should be not simply to create equal access in the existing society, but to work towards radical transformation. But that doesn't really fit in with her characterisation of second wave feminists as solely about restricting women's lives while hating men.
- I also think she either misunderstands or misrepresents The Vagina Monologues. I can be somewhat critical of them myself, especially by their particular exclusions. (There are some really interesting rewrites/companion pieces such asYoni Ki Baat, a set of Hindi monologues.) Levenson claims that "bringing women's experiences down solely to the vagina is to belittle the cause of women everywhere" (129). Which I wholeheartedly concur with. But I do not think that that is what the VMS either set out to do or in fact do do. Ensler is clear that she wrote the play because vaginas were missing from accounts of women's experiences, that women's bodies have been (not even just historically) seen and treated as disgusting and not to be mentioned. Again - ignoring entirely the contexts in which previous feminist work has occurred.
In the first chapter, there is a section called "Crying she-wolf, or how to recognise discrimination". I'm going to quote quite a long passage.
We need to be aware that things might happen to women that are unfair but are not necessarily a result of sexism. Yes sure, you could make the argument that living in a patriarchal society everything is the product of keeping men up and women down and is therefore inherently sexist, but beyond rising up and killing all men, what can we do? We can't call everything that doesn't go right for women sexist. Is war anti-women? Well actually it's anti-human. Where there is a panel of three at a conference session and they are all men is that sexism? It might be, or it may be that in that instance the three most suitable speakers were men. A man gets given the job? Perhaps he was the best candidate. Similarly we mustn't assume that every time we see a cleaner and it is a woman, it is a case of discrimination.I am not arguing against her basic point that "perhaps" not everything is sexism. But I really, really don't think that there is a lack of these messages already, and she certainly doesn't provide any counterpoint that, hey, sometimes when people say everything's fine they're fucking WRONG. And she reduces everything to such specific individual terms that it's useless. We mustn't assume that every time we see a cleaner [because cleaners are SEEN, and her intended audience certainly wouldn't BE cleaners] it's discrimination, and apparently we shouldn't think about the way that these jobs are overwhelmingly done by women, the division of labour more generally, the feminisation of poverty, the terrible conditions that many cleaning staff have to put up with, and the fact that it's often black women, and often recent immigrants to the UK (the f-word has a post about the SOAS cleaners being deported) who are cleaners. No, DON'T THINK, WHATEVER YOU DO.
the essence of the modern feminist, or noughtie girl - she does not want to be earnest all the time or feel the need to be political in all that she does.Yes, but it might help if she thought about SOMETHING, at least OCCASIONALLY. Ah well, here's something to cheer you up – the next section is about rape jokes.
Apparently Ellie Levenson used to do stand-up (she says she gave it up in part because she has a husband now and doesn't need the attention from strangers any more - no, I'm not joking (but if I were it would be funnier than the hack jokes she gives as examples of her act)), and as such she is an expert on rape jokes, and she finds them funny so anyone making a fuss just doesn't get it and is a prude who doesn't understand that there are REAL problems that they could be focusing on instead.
I see a fair amount of stand-up, and some of that includes rape jokes. (Substantially less than many people's experiences, I imagine, because I mostly see full-length sets from fairly lefty comedians, but it's a fairly common topic in UK comedy.) Occasionally these jokes can be funny, and astute. More often than not they are simply there for shock value. I sort of want to write that these jokes simply bore me, because I am not immune to the pressure not to undermine the all-new accepting happy feminism by carping on, but they don't actual bore me, they annoy me, and make me feel like shit a lot of the time. I do not think that rape itself is off-limits for comedy. There's a line that gets trotted out, and I'm afraid I don't know if there's an actual originator to whom it should be attributed, about there not being taboo subjects in comedy, only taboo approaches. So a joke about rape is not inherently anti-feminist, but when a large proportion of jokes about rape are simply there to make the teller seem "edgy", and often rely on acceptance of myths about rape, that's fucking anti-feminist. But in Noughtie, Levenson doesn't think about this at all, just claims that you shouldn't be upset by rape jokes because they're only jokes
But then Levenson's going for a version of "edgy" herself. Many of her chapter sections have provocative titles like "Why most women bosses are shits". This section is one of the bits supported by evidence from "a man I know" - who says he doesn't ever want to work for a woman boss again. "To many feminists this is an outrageous statement. To me it is an outrageous statement. Other than the fact that I am inclined to agree with him. Women bosses can be absolute terrors." She then backtracks slightly to say of course she doesn't mean all women, and it's sexist to extrapolate from one bad female boss. But the section isn't about that, it's about accepting the "fact" that women bosses are awful. It's once more back to the idea that feminists make a fuss about nothing some of the time, but she's not like that, she's not the humourless feminist who says it's not okay, not wanting to be the fun police, not wanting to rock the boat. She's a cool, noughties girl!
In the section "Should brains always be valued over beauty?", she asks "What is it about our society that means we should value those who are born with good brains more than those born with good looks?" To be honest, I'm not sure that society does do that. Furthermore, her book devotes far more attention to what people look like than what they think (think anything! or not at all! it's all feminist if you say it is!). Like most people who try to clean up feminism in order to make it more palatable (and less potent), she is concerned with body hair – she returns more than once to reassure the reader that you don't have to have hairy legs or armpits to be a feminist. Again, old feminism is presented as a tyrannical monolith sweeping through women's lives and snatching the razors and creams from their very hands.
I am more than slightly biased here, in that I am a hairy feminist (sorry, I should have said this upfront so that you could immediately discount my crazed despotic ramblings), and there is frankly no shortage of people telling me it is okay for me to remove my hair, that I am a better, more likeable person for doing so, and pretty much the only validation I get for my choice not to is other feminists. She does write about how much time and effort it takes for women to remove their body hair, and how much expectation there is that this is done. But rather than say that there is possibility for resistance, that feminism tries to enable this resistance, she writes:
I am saddened that women have to spend so much time, money and effort removing their body hair. On the other hand, it takes a brave woman to fight the hairy fight by herself - I'm certainly not about to be the one who leads the way. To go to the swimming pool with pubes coming out of the sides of a bikini, to let facial hair be obvious rather than removed or bleached. Even if I were comfortable with it, society wouldn't be.Oh well, certainly the last thing we want to do is push the boundaries of acceptable female appearance. We mustn't. Society wouldn't like it. Basically, what this paragraph says is that she would like it if things were different, but she wants other people to do the work to make it so. Okay! My reviled hairy body and I will get right on that for you.
One of the more confused parts of her book (Levenson would doubtless say that it's part of the wonderful contradictions of being a Noughtie girl, but she's wrong), is the inconsistencies in her attitudes to men. She constantly trots out the stereotype of man-hating feminists of yore, and goes for a very anti-separatist approach (not criticising that). She ponders what a modern men's movement would look like. Apparently:
They would appeal to women not to be scared when they are walking behind them on a dark street. Their posters might have slogans such as 'I'm a man not a rapist'.So the modern men's movement would place responsibility for fear of sexual assault onto women. Hurrah! I for one certainly didn't have enough to occupy me before. And also, remember that you are responsible for putting out signals too:
letting a man buy you dinner isn't saying you will definitely sleep with him either that evening or in the future, but it is suggesting that you haven't yet decided you definitely won't. Or if you have decided you won't, then why let him buy you dinner in the first place?Because you don't have as much money as he does? Because you figure you'll get it the next time? Because you don't actually see all men only in terms of a potential relationship/sex partner and sometimes friends buy each other dinner? Because you're HUNGRY?
But then she also wants certain parts of what you might term female culture to stay single-sex. She doesn't want unisex toilets (despite approving of the theory) because she wouldn't feel comfortable asking another woman for a tampon there
No, women's loos are not just for peeing, but a whole lot more that should perhaps remain one of the secrets of our sex.The mythical male contraceptive pill pops up once or twice, and Levenson is not entirely sure about it. There are the reasonable (to me) points about being able to trust someone else to take a pill when it's your body that's going to bear the consequences (though it we have the female pill in implant form, why not a male one? Foreplay can only be enhanced by having a poke at an upper arm.) Then there is this:
Second however is an argument far more serious than that. If men had the option of controlling their own fertility in that way, would women ever get the babies they want? What if men never stopped taking their pill, turning off their fertility until it was too late for their partners to conceive? Is it possible that men could collectively decide to do this so that they force the situation of women having to go out with much older men in order to get the babies they want?"Oh no, men might be able to CONTROL THEIR OWN FERTILITY. I do know that it is not that simple, that there are broader issues. But to say that the problem with a male pill is that women won't be able to coerce men into having children is frankly disgusting. In the cosmo-style quiz at the start, one of the questions is about your male partner (all noughtie girls have or want male partners, remember) offering to take the pill. And a "c" answer, which is the "good" answer, is "Say yes, but because you don't trust him to remember you secretly get fitted with a coil as well".
But then Levenson thinks that one of the problems of eventual equality, yes, PROBLEMS, is that men might want to stay at home with the children.
do I feel threatened by the idea that men might usurp women in automatically assuming a right to this role? I'm afraid I do. I suspect that this is how men in the boardroom feel about women in the workplace, which doesn't mean either or us is right, but does perhaps make it more understandable. This once again reminds us that while feminism is about equality and about choice, not all of the fruits of equality will necessarily be welcomed by us all, and while I believe we need it, I think it's important to recognise that when feminism is realised and equality comes, there may be things we don't like about equality as well as things that we do."Fortunately, Levenson's book will do fuck all to bring equality about, so she doesn't have to worry about this.
In Noughtie she is very defensive about relationships with men, but assumes that all women either have them or want them, and this is certainly something that "just is" and no-one should think about how that might come to be. Some of you probably have female friends. Have you ever thought about why? You might think that it's because you like them. Levenson continues her streak of knowing nothing about history by claiming that single sex friendship groups like Sex and the City (of course like SatC, what else would she cite) are new.
now we're no longer fighting each other for men, or competing to find a husband, we instead need people to go out and have fun with. Though fun is not just equated with sex, essentially this means going to bars and clubs to look for sex, or at the very least male attention, and going out for meals and shopping together and examining where things went right or wrong. I am not saying that women are only concerned with finding a mate […] but finding a mate is a huge part of female friendships. By the time we do find our partners, we're so reliant on our female friends that they are fixtures in our lives, plus we need them to talk to about our partner and to get reassurance that we are normal.I think this was the part of the book that upset me most. I am used to reading thinly-disguised post/anti-feminist shit that relies on stupid stereotypes about feminism, and most of the rest of the book is only surprising in that it's being touted as feminism and not a Daily Mail article, but even these tend to stress the importance of female companionship, that friendship is not a poor second to heterosexual relationships. To have my friendships with women (NONE OF WHOM HAVE FOUND ME A MAN (okay, Kat can consider herself excepted on a technicality) reduced to this hideous state of being important to get a man, and then once you have a man you've got them anyway so you might as well use them to talk about your man is sickening.
I think [women like engagement rings because they] want the rest of the world to see that they are engaged, because however feminist we are, however scornful of marriage we are and however much we pretend we don't care what others think, actually we enjoy the attention. After all, I once heard someone say that there are only two times women are the centre of attention in their lives – when they are engaged and when they are pregnant.Yes, by all means let's keep this restriction. Not say that it is understandable that women enjoy attention, and being engaged is one of the few acceptable times to court attention, and that this is pretty much (though not entirely) restricted to heterosexual women, but to just go "but I LIKE it".
One of Levenson's "controversial" points that she made in her f-word post, and is also in the book, is that she thinks that you shouldn't allow a man to take you to dinner if you're not going to sleep with him. This may seem contradictory, when her opening quiz suggested that only a crazed feminazi would object to a man insisting on paying. It also contradicts a point in her final chapter (where she finally gets around to talking about action instead of merely calling yourself a feminist), when she says that you should pay your way when you are taken out for dinner in order to act as a feminist. However, she is careful to insist that noughties girls are by their nature contradictory, so we're not allowed to criticise her on that point. Or any point. Stop crying she-wolf, h8ers!
I should point out that the very last chapter of the book is "Forward Feminism", where activism is actually suggested. These are mostly, again, very individualistic options (and, in some cases, contradict what she's been saying in the rest of the book). But, in fairness, she does try to suggest somewhere to go with feminism once she's redefined it almost out of existence. And that's what most frustrates me with this book. It's the first UK based popular feminist book of its kind since 1999 (when Natasha Walter's The New Feminism was published), and it covers important topics, and could have been used to help young women work out what they want from life, and how and if feminism was something that could be a useful tool. But it doesn't. And I feel, somewhat irrationally, perhaps, betrayed.
The standard response to any criticism is "well, why don't you do better". For a start, I don't think that I could write a particularly good book about feminism for young women, and in any case, I procrastinate enough already. But more than that, I think that this is the only sort of book about feminism that would get published and marketed widely (it seems to be in a promotion in Waterstones). I do not think that there is a huge secret conspiracy against feminism
*1 I was concerned about using this as a reference, because I think it gets brought into discussions in ways that are distinctly dodgy, but then I realised that as if I, as a feminist, decide that the choice I want is to use it, then it is ergo a feminist choice!!!
*2 I think that there is a great deal of pressure on young women to work on themselves, to act in certain ways and to achieve (there's lots about this in girlhood studies - Anita Harris's work is excellent), and that feminism can be a contributing factor to these pressures. But there is ALSO pressure not to criticise things, especially as a feminist, and Levenson pays no attention to this.
