That lovely blog that started the maelstrom against Taylor Swift decided to go interview women waiting in line for the Palin book signing in Fairfax, Va. and incorporate the cover article on feminism in Newsmax this month. The author, Amanda Hess, forgot to mention that the Newsmax article was written by S.E. Cupp, a young female conservative. Since young, female conservatives don’t exist in feminist-land and are only the creation of old, white men in the GOP, she had to  snidely attack the women waiting in line:

In “newer feminism,” every woman’s choices are valued—no matter what those choices mean for other women. Schlessinger isn’t an enforcer of rigid gender roles; she’s a facilitator of women’s choices. Palin’s opposition to abortion rights and comprehensive sex education isn’t anti-feminist; it is her choice to deny reproductive choices to other women. Under this model, Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis isn’t an exploiter; he’s a liberator of women’s breasts.

Umm…no. Joe Francis is a pornographer and will be to the vast majority of conservative women. But ladies — and I sincerely hope that Amanda Hess and her colleagues find this post– let me spell it out for you. Sarah Palin is simply a marriage of conservative values with the watered-down version of feminism that you gals sold in the 90s in order to save a crippled and dying movement. Until Palin appeared, no one on the right had represented a liberated woman “making choices for herself,” successfully balancing the family and a career, and enjoying a modern marriage with her not-so-metrosexual husband. You were operating under the assumption that the Gloria Steinem vs. Phyllis Schafly dynamic still worked.

Despite my staunchly anti-feminist upbringing, I’ve gotten familiar with the f-word. I worked for a quasi-feminist organization. Well, it’s an organization determined to train little feminists, but it gave me a solid crash course in all things liberal women. After I left that job, I decided to get to the bottom of this feminist issue. I had been blogging anonymously for nearly a year but had danced around the subject. After I moved back to the DC area, I dove into reading feminist theory, history and anything from the women’s studies genre. I was determined to understand what feminism was. The only problem was that feminists were asking that too.  Sadly for them, Palin arrived on the scene before they could reach an answer.

To understand it, let’s go back to the beginning. Hopefully, this history is familiar to most of you.

Feminism got its start on the radical left. It grew directly out of the the civil rights movement. However, these weren’t the average people who wanted to see racial equality, but a complete restructuring of our country. Many of them were children of Communist Party of America members and had grown up as “red diaper babies” as Susan Brownmiller lavishes in her memoirs, In Our Own Time.

From the earliest moments, which could be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir, a radical leftist and often-abused significant other of Jean-Paul Sartre, when she penned the Second Sex in 1949 or even when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication on the Rights of Women in 1792, the women’s rights movement was aligned with the political left. A little-known fact about Betty Friedan–when she wasn’t pining away at the “problem with no name,” she was active in Communist Party activities and had been since her student days at Smith. In fact, she joined the party in 1940.

Thus, feminism wasn’t this nice, “lets talk about our click moments and fight for equality” but a movement that desired to reshape our entire culture, society and economic systems into something that eliminated the vague “patriarchy” and the evils of capitalism. Essentially, feminism is the gender version of Marxism.

Almost immediately, the women’s liberation movement started splintering. The radical feminist wanted nothing less than a societal revolution. The liberal feminists were much more content with fighting for abortion on demand, workplace discrimination and liberating those beleaguered housewives. However, they were a rather homogeneous group of females. Anytime someone from the outside tried to join — and  outside being anyone who wasn’t white, middle class,  heterosexual,  bi-coastal, highly educated, professional and with an axe to grind against men due to daddy issues or boyfriends unwilling to commit — ultimately left. Early divisions were painstakingly  marked by African-American women and lesbians starting their own versions of the movement.

Later on when multiculturalism got popular in the 1980s, feminists embraced it because the philosophy fit them so well. It covered a multitude of sins, namely that at no point had they been able to unify all women simply by being women. No women’s movement has ever been able to do that, even suffragists who fought for the 19th Amendment were split across numerous issues. However, issues with identity politics are for another post.

Somehow, small groups of noisy women managed to make policy changes.  By infiltrating the Federal government through the EEOC, academia and the media (a large number of the early leaders were writers and journalists), they made sweeping changes through sheer willpower, litigation and scare tactics.

However, where they failed and continue to fail was winning the hearts and opinions of American women.

When the Equal Rights Agenda failed after the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, feminists were at a loss. Much soul-searching went on. Numerous books were written, including Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, which asserted that conservative women were under the thumbs of their men, had no minds of their own and as slaves to their Bibles and kitchens, would advocate against anything Phyliss Schafly described as “anti-family.”

They never stopped to think that conservative women actually believed that they were already equal, relished being mothers and caretakers and were quite happy with the capitalistic system that made America great. The women’s movement never even contemplated that a large voting bloc of women were more concerned liberty and the individual than tolerance and the collective.

Conservative women were lamented and dismissed, not to be contemplated again until the rise of Sarah Palin. Maybe if they had been a bit more intellectually honest and circumspect, today’s problems wouldn’t be going on.

Nevertheless, the feminists shifted agendas and went to work on issues relating to higher education and did some good things with domestic violence and rape issues. However, by the late 80s, the movement had lost steam. Feminist debates were dragged into mommywars, the myth of the Supermom and the wailing of single women with ticking biological clocks.

They didn’t realize that a new generation of women had grown up without gender discrimination and really didn’t identify with the second-wave grand dames. Instead, they had grown up with MTV and decided to somehow merge feminism with raunch culture.

This third-wave that sprung up in the 90s had a lot of public fights with the old school, namely over sexual liberation. Since they wanted to appeal to young women, they watered down the message that their mothers had told them. For example, in Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards define feminism as:

Of course the goals of feminism are carried out by every day women themselves. Maybe you aren’t sure you need feminism, or you’re not sure it needs you. You’re sexy, a wallflower, you shop at Calvin Klein, you are a stay-at-home mom, a big Hollywood producer, a beautiful bride all in white, an ex-wife raising three kids, or you shave, pluck, and wax. In reality, feminism wants you to be whoever you are-but with a political consciousness. And, vice versa: You want to be a feminist because you want to be exactly who you are.

The 3rd wavers consisted of sexually liberated women, riot grrls and women who loved to create ‘zines. All political movements– no matter the issue– always lose nuances in the media, and the media was rather silly with third wave women. Images such as the Spice Girls, Ally McBeal and “girl power” came to capture what feminism meant to modern women. The watershed momement of the third wave was the Clarence Thomas hearings that catapulted sexual harassment to the front page. However, when a liberal Democrat with a penchant for oral sex in the Oval Office took over, feminists completely sold out and lost their remaining strand of credibility with Gloria Steinem famously declaring “it was consensual!”

Between the late 90s and now, not much happened. Compared to terrorism, feminism just wasn’t that important. Then John McCain picked La Palin, and the head-spinning started.

You see ladies, what the feminism movement missed was that a lot had changed in conservative politics. Conservative women weren’t doormats, we just never had anyone that espoused our values with the “picture” of feminism before. As Leslie Sanchez notes, women will only vote for candidates who share their own views. The concept that women will vote for another women simply due to shared chromosomes is ridiculous. If Geraldine Ferraro had been conservative in the 80s, we would have supported her. The nice thing about basing your values on invididuality, merit and talent is that you don’t have to promote superficial labels.

For us, Palin was the real deal. By 2008, most women worked outside the home and led very similar lives to the Governor. Again, they were very different from the still white, middle class, highly educated, bi-coastal feminists. When you combine the fact that many of us grew up with thirdd-wave “you go girl!” feminism, it made sense that Palin ushered in a era of conservative or libertarian-leaning feminism.

Is it really that hard to understand that the American women rejected your politics in the 1980s, so you massaged the message in the 90s and now have to live with the consequences? Had the movement not changed its views so much, not many of you would exist, but you’d have some credibility left.

This isn’t a slam on them by any means. Undergraduates rarely write anything creative or original. At the bachelor level, students need to master information and concepts. I imagine these young women thought, “Let’s try to dispel some stereotypes and enlighten others on campus. We’ll write an op-ed!”

Join me in playing, “Spot the feminist writer!”

Do you believe in equality? Do you believe that people should be able to make decisions about their own bodies? Do you believe that men and women should be paid the same? If you answered yes, you just might be a feminist.

Definitely third wave feminist. Possibly Valenti or Baumgardner. Making feminism accessible to the masses is the primary goal of third wave feminism.

Don’t be fooled by misleading rhetoric or trite myths. Despite recent press, real feminism is not dead. Feminism is not about sitting around complaining, it’s about choice and achieving equality. A feminist is simply someone who supports true equality for everyone. However, many stereotypes about feminism and feminists exist. To clear some things up, bras were not burned and feminists aren’t hairy Sasquatches intent on destroying men. The feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were known as second wave feminists, and some of these were “radical” due to the need for a revolt against the entrenched sexism and systematic oppression of women in that era. Indeed, many elements of that sexism still exist. But, the movement has changed, as have the people, creating the third wave. They place greater focus on multiculturalism, class differences, the role of racism, LGBT rights and the rights of women all over the world.

Again, third wave. This reads straight out of Manifesta or Full Frontal Feminism.

Sidebar: Feminists may not have burned bras, but that’s only because they could not get a permit to build a fire at the 1968 Miss America Protest in Atlantic City. Instead, they threw bras, falsies, makeup, curlers, (tokens of oppressed femininity) in to a garbage can. The term “bra burning” was mistakenly used in a press release and stuck. It’s a perception vs. reality situation.

Those anti-feminist myths are meant to distract people from the bigger picture of systematic oppression. We live in a system with an unequal balance of power. This hegemonic system is known as patriarchy in which women, minorities, LGBT folk, etc. comprise the subordinate groups. By distracting oppressed groups with insignificant issues or debates, we allow ourselves to ignore the issues really concerning feminists: domestic abuse and sexual assault, inequitable wages, human trafficking, feminization of poverty, reproductive freedom, discrimination and segregation in the workplace, and education. In such a system, no one wins.

This goes back to Simone de Beauvoir, Dworkin, Greer, Faludi, Firestone and Millet.

This paragraph made me laugh. So, there’s a conspiracy against women? Only it’s such a huge conspiracy that men don’t realize what they’re doing and women unknowingly raise their sons to perpetuate it? Why not just say fate is a cruel bitch and there’s nothing we can do? If that oppressive patriarchy didn’t exist, chances are neither Ms. Burns or Ms. Hogan would have had the choice to attend James Madison University nor the resources to pay for it. They would have taken tests early in their elementary days that determined the amount and type of resources that the state invested in them. They wouldn’t be able to fight for “equal rights” because that would send them immediately to the gulag. Furthermore, it’s the welfare policies of the Democratic party that caused the feminization of poverty. However, that’s another blog post for another day. If the system that they are referencing is the current system that they are living under, everyone wins. Everyone has the freedom and opportunity to do whatever they want and go as far as they want. Again, the evils of democracy are a terrible burden. The ability to re-hash everything you’ve ever learned in a women’s studies class is just wrong!

We must realize our personal actions have far-reaching consequences and are results of a larger system at work. When one woman is raped, it is not solely the rapist’s fault, but that man playing into society’s hyper-masculine role coupled with the overall devaluation and objectification of women. The combination of all institutions — the media, science, education, religion, advertising — devalues, objectifies and dehumanizes women. The process of stripping individuals of power transforms them into objects for male violence. In societies where women have higher social status and value, the occurrence of rape is much lower. Men are not inherently bad, but rather, the system of patriarchy is harmful for everyone. In fact, women usually indoctrinate their children into patriarchy. We all play roles within this system, which is why we must all take action.

Again de Beauvoir, Millet and lots of Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.

This also references the evil of capitalism and our society. They forget to point out that far more men are raped every year within the prison system than women. The 1 in 4 number of rape is developed by lumping rape, attempted rape and sexual harassment together. Thus, if you were cat-called by a construction worker or a guy said something inappropriate in a bar, you are grouped with real victims of rape.

I see a lot of mentions of the patriarchy, but how do we overcome it? The feminists have been fighting it for nearly 50 years. What’s the deal?If there is a problem with a system, suggest another one. Yet, they never do.

If one really wants to know what a feminist looks like, he or she should consider taking women’s studies courses and joining feminist organizations on campus such as CARE, NOW, Sister Speak, Her Two Cents or the Take Back the Night Coalition. Feminists are not a homogenous group with a monolithic doctrine but rather diverse individuals who believe in equal human rights for men and women with differing perspectives on how to achieve that goal. Both the stay-at-home mom and the Fortune 500 CEO can be feminists.

Third wave again, although I’d go with Baumgardner and Richards. They’re not as hostile towards stay-at-home moms

Apathy toward such rampant inequality has to end. We must stand strong in our convictions without compromising ourselves, or our ultimate pursuit of equality, on an issue much bigger than us. We must empower ourselves and one another, recognizing our actions and those of others as the deciding factor in whether or not we maintain this system. Awareness of our choices and the ability to choose what is right on an individual basis must be raised to a larger scale. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves, what do I want for myself, for my children and for the world? If equality is the answer, then you too can say, “This is what a feminist looks like.”

Assortment of third-wave writers all shouting “equality!” and “you go, girl!”

This piece shows several things:

1. The pedagogy of women’s studies programs does not exist to instill knowledge, history or concepts but to build an activist army. These aren’t independant thinkers trying to synthesize what they’ve learned in order to forge ahead in their own scholarship. The modern academy creates drones simply memorizing rote facts. Where is the critical thinking in this?
2. Because women’s studies programs are so insulated, the general public does not understand the philosophy behind this movement/philosophy/academic subject. This allows op-eds such as this one to narrowly define one side of the debate. It’s doubtful that any conservative young women on this campus are knowledgeable enough nor willing to debate this op-ed.

The second point is crucial. How many conservative women are familiar with feminist theories? Sure, we could probably all name Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan as leading feminists, but any others? Six months ago I wouldn’t have been able to answer that. In order to defeat this or at least reign in the movement, we need to know the philosophy and the players. Feminists know who their enemies are they study them. We’re playing blind.