I’ve written at length about the Sarah Palin debates, which always veer from her political views to making personal attacks and even threats. As I pointed out yesterday, they’ve even done it to Lady Gaga. Remember their attacks on Taylor Swift? Now, the target is Tina Fey.

Perhaps portraying Sarah Palin on SNL rubbed off some of Fey’s feminism?

It all started with a few gals on the fem blogs whining about Fey mocking single women and emphasizing stereotypes. The Frisky has a wrap-up of what I’ve seen the last few days on the interwebs.

In a nutshell, the feminist whiners bloggers are upset because they had all these expectations for Fey to channel all of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to change society through her humor. Bottom line: Fey may be a liberal, but she’s a comedian. She’s going to do anything to get a laugh.

This is what Fey does best. She is hilarious and quite funny…in that one character. Almost every movie role or character she plays is always the hopeless single woman. Her role in Mean Girls was a recent divorcee. In Baby Momma, she was a career woman with a ticking biological clock. Liz Lemon, her 30 Rock character is the neurotic single woman. I haven’t seen her new movie yet, but she actually plays a married woman! Quite the departure.

I’d say that Fey is more typecast, but it’s more fun to debate if she’s a feminist or not!

Feminists did this to themselves. By their own admission, they proudly state that there’s no one definition of feminism. Some people even call it “feminisms” to capture the many versions of the movement. To feminists, everything is a “woman” issue from the economy, health care, abortion, workforce, education, sports, entertainment, etc.

Thus, when you refuse to define what your movement is, how do you have the right to decide who is a feminist and who isn’t? Isn’t that a double-standard?

This is hardly new. While all liberal “isms” are doomed to keep repeating failed ideas (social welfare programs, anyone?), feminists have always attacked their own ranks in search of the “perfect feminist.” In the early days of the radical women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, no one could emerge as a leader because there wasn’t a woman capable of fulfilling all the expectations. She couldn’t be white and black, rich and poor, educated and working class, lesbian and straight. Quite simply, when you claim to have a big tent movement, you’ll never find the perfect leader or icon.

Hence the last 30 years of “Is she a feminist” game. It’s a no-win situation for them, but then it keeps the fem blogs distracted and gives me something to laugh at. Keep it up!

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.

Earlier this week, I posted a link to the firestorm that Amanda Hess set off by attacking Swift’s wholesomeness. Other bloggers have picked up the theme and continue attack her for wearing sparkly dresses, the frequent use of the Cinderella theme in her videos, and the lack of man-hating in her lyrics. Now, I like Taylor Swift. I don’t identify with her music since I’m long past high school, but it’s fun and catchy. It’s great for road trips when I amuse myself by singing to my iPod.

I don’t understand the debate. Unlike Britney or Jessica Simpson who  made a big deal over their values and virginity, Swift hasn’t said anything. She hasn’t made any proclamations about her faith or values. She hasn’t leveraged her purity to sell more records, and her dad hasn’t made creepy comments about her.  She isn’t beating any sensitive, politically correct liberals over the head with Bible verses or being “intolerant.” In fact, all she’s done is put out catchy music and wear lots of formals in her public appearances. The closest thing to being “offensive” was  dating a Jonas Brother, who have made a big deal out of their faith.

I don’t know the motivations behind Swift’s image. Her parents are extremely wealthy and moved to Nashville in order to pursue her music career. Most up-and-coming singers  don’t have their own recording studios at home. Her image could be a ploy to be the good girl and then take the path well-traveled by Christina, Britney, Lindsay and Miley Cyrus once she’s solidified her fan base.

Or, perhaps Taylor Swift could just like romance and pretty dresses. What’s wrong with that?

Thus far, Swift has conducted herself with poise and dignity. She has not used sex or her body to fuel record sales. In most career paths, we would call that mature and professional. As a society, are we so desensitized to raunchiness  that when a young woman conducts herself as a lady, we question her motivations?

Are feminists attacking her because Swift is nearing 20 and not “exploring her sexuality” by putting out raunchy videos? Or, is the media getting tired of her wholesome image and trying to manufacture her downfall since Swift seems to be mature and happy? Is there not enough drama for tabloid fodder? Jezebel puzzles over this:

She’s completely non-threatening to some because she doesn’t rely on overt sexuality to sell records, and yet she’s incredibly threatening to others because her image seems to rely on the suppression of sexuality in order to sell records. Taylor Swift, in short, is confusing the hell out of everyone. As Amanda Hess of The Sexist writes, “I don’t know if Taylor Swift is a feminist role model, or a palpable pop princess sent from the Christian right to corral the youth of America into antiquated gender roles.”

These types of posts truly disgust me. Why are they giving Taylor Swift the Palin treatment simply because she doesn’t adhere to established stereotypes and frames? Not many women set out to disprove the Cinderella story. In fact, most women never quite give up the princess fantasy. Watch a few episodes of Say Yes to the Dress if you disagree.

Taylor Swift is not surreptitiously forcing old-fashioned values or “anti-feminist” ideals on anyone. She’s boldly writing music about her own perceptions and experiences in life. The fact that she’s so successful shows that she resounds with most people, particularly tweens and teenage girls. She has guts to attack ex-boyfriends by writing songs about them.

Why do women in the media spotlight have to ascribe to feminism and be feminist role models? Why do self-proclaimed “feminists” get to decide who deserves the label and attack those they deem unworthy? Taylor Swift  is another example of  a strong, independent woman who doesn’t quite fit within the narrow stereotype of the women’s movement. Unlike Sarah Palin, who was brave enough to call herself a feminist and stand for pro-life values and marriage, Swift is simply an entertainer. What has she done to deserve this backlash?

Swift isn’t a trailblazer nor is she courting the “religious right.” She’s merely being a feminine woman, something which most liberal women will never understand.  She’s like Palin in the sense that the vast majority of women identify with her. Women like to be treated like princesses and look pretty. Most women remember having their heartbroken as teenagers or experiencing unrequited love. She’s popular because most people go through those things. Most women don’t exploit their sexuality as “power” and get ticked off when treated like a $2 hooker. Most women, including myself, like men to be chivalrous. They aren’t going to propose or ask guys out like Amanda Hess complains.

The Chaliceblog does point out a hypocrisy that I noted a few weeks ago:

*It says something that when Buffy the Vampire Slayer slept with a boy who literally TURNED EVIL, this was regarded as more or less symbolic truth and I don’t recall any feminist critiques of the matter.

Women out there should be offended by these attacks on Taylor Swift. Attacks on Swift — like attacks on Sarah Palin — are attacks on women like myself. These bloggers are trying to destroy any media images of traditional values or femininity and be the sole voice for young girls and women. There’s a pattern here, Palin, Twilight and now Taylor Swift. Through these articles and blog posts, liberal women are trying to shut down any image counter to the one they support. If feminine and traditional images like Taylor Swift are allowed to succeed, that’s one more blow to their fragile movement. They simply can not allow the idea to continue that some women like the idea of Prince Charming, acting like a lady or dressing feminine. That negates all of their work, going back to Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. In order to be successful and survive, Taylor Swift, Sarah Palin, Twilight and any other varation of tradition, romance, femininity or Cinderella must be systematically destroyed. Images of successful, happy women who choose traditional roles or even traditional ways of dressing prove that feminism is not the answer for women and exposes the movement for the fraud that it is.

Feminists are in meltdown about the future of abortion. Ironic that they’re losing support because younger generations are more pro-life. When you kill your offspring, you can’t instill your values into the next generation. Conservatives may win simply because we like kids and the numbers are on our side.

From a Young Woman to (Some) of the Menopausal Militia, RHRealityCheck.com

It seems the protest for the Stupak amendment didn’t go so well yesterday, and feminists are bickering at each other in response to the article mentioned above.  Hehe! Keep it up ladies.

Ehrenrich: The Pink-Ribbon Breast Cancer Cult, Alternet

Ehrenrich complains that feminism has been replaced by breast cancer awareness and the focus has shifted away from abortion. I would say that the pink-washing of feminism is the only thing that’s kept it in the news for the past decade. If people knew the truth behind it, no one would follow it.

Taylor Swift: Pop princess, feminist villan? Salon

Seriously? First it was Palin, then it was Twilight. Now Taylor Swift is the catching the ire of feminists. Can’t a young woman just write about what she wants? How many 19-year-olds have the talent to write songs? At 19, did you sit around pondering deep issues of society?  Do all female artists have to be Melissa Ethridge or the Indigo Girls? Sheesh.

Patience Is a (Feminist) Virtue, The Sexist, Washington City Paper

It’s strange that by pursuing traditional roles and values, I’m now counter-cultural. I need a “Proud Supporter of the Patriarchy” t-shirt.

Ms. Pac-Man: Post Feminist Icon, Moving Pixels

A satirical view of the popular 80s arcade game within the realm of feminism. Entertaining, but it makes me wish that I had one. I loved Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Classic gaming is very in right now.

Where’s My Post-Feminist Manifesto, The Cornell Daily Sun

Another funny editorial about the dismal state of feminism. I like these. Keep them coming.

Duke University Digital Collection, Vintage Ads

Absolutely nothing to do with feminism, but I’m looking for vintage ads to use as artwork in my apartment. The ads are organized by year and subject. Very cool. Also helps fulfill Mad Men withdrawal.