I'm Not a Feminist, But...

For college-aged women, “feminism” has been a bad word for some time. As columnist Maureen Dowd put it, “the triumph of feminism [lasted] a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.”

It conjures up not the highfalutin ideals and aspirations of the ’60s, but a caricature: a woman harping on about gendered pronouns and “patriarchal societal structures,” insisting on the spelling of “womyn” and derogating “housework.”

College girls do not want to be this person; it’s not sexy.

Instead, the iconoclastic pastoral of the ’60s has given way to armies of maquillée women in manufactured miniskirts, a model reflected in Sex and the City. This is not only a shift in style. According to female friends, the social prescription that men should open doors for women has come back. On a date, a woman might make a perfunctory attempt to pay for her portion of a meal, but if the man doesn’t stop her, it’s a no-go.

A controversial article by New York Times reporter Louise Story revealed that some women at elite educational institutions planned on suspending their careers once they had children. The same article reports that faculty and administrators have noticed a shift in the attitudes of women since the height of the women’s movement; the optimism — that a woman could have a career and a family — has been replaced with the realism of having to choose between the two.

Far from cutting free of putative ideals of femininity and the human body, at the gym one sees rows of women on elliptical machines reading Cosmo articles about the “Five Dates that will Drive Him Wild.” It’s the ’50s cat-mouse game with a different — more explicit — set of cards.

It is a mistake to wax nostalgic about a utopian moment for the women’s movement that never existed or to assume that “feminism” is a single thing; it is different things to different people at different times. I would like to make the modest claim that women’s autonomy and worth have taken a back seat in a society that produces Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire and Girls Gone Wild. And I would like to make the less modest claim that many college-aged women are apathetic about it. Would this have been the case in 1970?

Perhaps some women shirk feminism for fear of being associated with “femi-NAZIs,” a consideration most present in the couching phrase “I’m not a feminist, but ...” At Cornell, one sorority told a group of women performing “The Vagina Monologues” that the show “wasn’t the type of thing [their] girls are interested in.” And it isn’t just Cornell: a CNN poll conducted in 2005 found that 70 percent of women do not consider themselves feminists.

One can believe in women’s rights, but what appears to be most important here is to avoid “making a big deal about it,” being perceived as a combative radical. In online discussion boards discussing issues of gender, some women write about the “hardcore feminists” whose recondite Marxist rhetoric they do not connect to, evidence that some relate to concrete talk about salaries, childcare and divvying up housework more readily than discussions about revolution and the program of “deconstructing gender.” The negative perception is best summed up by the title of a discussion thread on one of these message boards: “Why is it that I never see pleasant happy attractive women joining the feminist movement?”

The fact that a movement — or perhaps, the label for the movement — has outstripped the cause is not unique. Some gays feel conflicted about how activists represent them. And some conservatives say that the Bush administration has misrepresented “true” conservatism. I do not think that there is such a thing as “true feminism” or “true conservatism,” but I do believe that when women talk about “true feminism,” they are talking about what they wish it were rather than what it is.

Some women I asked said they felt the women’s movement framed the sort of choices women make: choosing motherhood or getting married amounts to acquiescing to patriarchy; taking an interest in fashion or one’s appearance means encouraging the perception of women as sex objects. These value judgments, they said, put some women on the defensive and give the impression that feminism is about expectations rather than choices.

Whatever the origin of the feminist stereotype, it is disempowering; women shy away from aligning themselves with certain positions to avoid activating it. What one is left with is a society where women choose between apathetic acquiescence and the perception of being “unpleasant, unhappy and unattractive.”

Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com [1]. The Red Line appears Thursdays.