Don’t be afraid to reclaim the F-word

Feminism. The word cuts through conversation like an empty wine glass struck before a speech, punctuated – not by a heavy stumbling to stand or a resonating clink – but a slow roll of the eyes, a sigh, a shrug. Feminism, in short, has lost its sex appeal. Quite literally; women shy away from the term as if, in one fell anti-Cinderella swoop they would be magically transformed into lumpy, man-hating dungaree-wearers with perma-mullets and armpit hair.

This won’t come as news for most of us; we are well aware that the whole concept of feminism has been skewed, presented in a way which has effectively made it into a parody of itself, so that feminist equals aggressive, feminist equals butch, feminist equals relic. As Rory Dicker put it, in his book ‘A History of U.S. Feminisms’, it has become “dangerous and profane, an explosive term angry, unfeminine women use to identify themselves”.

Is the problem then a matter of semantics? If we follow that particular logic then the solution is simple: change the word and remove the stigma. What then might replace it? We cannot escape the fact that where feminism once stood a host of new names, each more ridiculous than the last, is likely to spring up (my vote would be for Gynotopianism) rendering the whole notion idiotic.

And what of pop-culture’s second favourite two-word hyphenate, Post-Feminism? (Aren’t we told that we are currently living in a ‘post-feminist’ era after-all?) It seems to me the term ‘post’ is itself a dangerous one; apparently a convenient alternative to the ‘F-word’, its general acceptance would sound the knell of feminism once and for all, forcing us to confront the same conundrum as we find ourselves in regarding post-feminism’s beret wearing cousin ‘post-modernism’ – lost in a sea of ostensibly contradictory definitions.

Famously Foucault described modernism as an attitude of struggling everyday to reinvent oneself anew, as a constant reassertion of oneself in a rapidly changing and increasingly fractured world – what then does the advent of post-modernism imply? What happens when one ceases to struggle? Death? Complacency?

The moment we start to treat Feminism as a closed event, it actually facilitates inequality as nothing becomes a symptom of sexism.

Take advertisement campaigns for hipster clothing brands such as American Apparel, featuring models who are hardly promoting the clothing of the company, but rather the body, the attitude, the sex of the brand. This is called empowering by some, as the ultimate re-appropriation of the female form, but (call me prudish if you will) I see these grainy black and white shots of, often, emaciated women spread-legged in net pants as an example of ultimate, embedded sexism.
The fact of the matter is that these images do not just objectify women, presenting them as pornographically sexual objects, but do so for the benefit of women. The ploy undoubtedly works, women buy the (rather poorly made) clothes because they want to replicate the fantasy that the brand is selling – that you too can become a version of the semi-naked spread-eagled sex object – but the fantasy that we are buying into is that of our own self-objectification. Proof, to my mind, that society is so constructed around images of gender difference that women have to train themselves not to promote them.

I agree that the radical brand of second-wave feminism prevalent in the nineteen sixties and seventies is generally outmoded in our current social clime; its militancy serving to emphasise a divide between the sexes rather than to simply equalise. Perhaps then it is our generation’s chance to renew feminism and its aims, modify and potentially moderate them in accordance with the less drastically unequal society we live in today.

A move, in other words, towards what is known as equity-feminism, which supports the moral doctrine of equality, leaping into action when this is transgressed on either side.
Feminism, as we knew it, may have died a painful death; (Carol Anne Duffy in the kitchen with the Birkenstocks) long live Feminism!