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Jessica Valenti just sent a cool newsletter called “The Truth About Housewives,” and she begins by picking apart a TikTok video that is part of a growing catalog of videos suggesting feminism has been a bad thing. Here is the video in question.
Valenti then adds this:
The video is easy to pick apart, of course — this idealized version of 1950s housewives never really existed outside of advertisements and television shows. In reality, housewives were trapped. Literally. They had no financial security, no ability to apply for a line of credit or even have a bank account; they were victims of domestic violence, which was illegal in name only; they could be institutionalized by their husbands or fathers if they deviated from the norm, and were often medicated to the gills.
And that’s just the women who had husbands with enough money that they could stay at home. Women like my grandmother, who worked in bars and factories, didn’t have a white picket fence and starched aprons. Women of color didn’t have access to this ‘dream’ of American womanhood either; they were more likely to be domestic help for white housewives.
Then I thought of this section, which is from the article “I Still Believe In The Power of Sexual Freedom:”
Please note the use of the term “internal shame machines” at the end of that quote.
I’m a dude, so this is all hard to discuss.
I don’t know all the right semantic terms, and I don’t want to get “cancelled” anymore than I already am online. But … it does feel like there isn’t a clear goal for modern feminism, or there’s many factions competing to define what the goal is, and no singular faction has won out. Is that it?
I also have wondered this: while I understand the gaping chasm of a power difference, should Monica Lewinsky truly be a feminist icon of modernity? (Discuss.) In the same vein, can’t we admit that some women just like to have sex, and not do this whole dance below?
Level of beasts. Jesus.
It feels to me sometimes like modern feminism is akin to modern DEI initiatives: it’s all about semantics and acronyms and words without tangible meaning and identities, and as a result, there’s a giant soup of “What exactly is this, and what’s it trying to accomplish?”
Anyone else feel that way?
