The "F-word"

For this blog on "Fear of Feminism; why young women get the willies" and "A Tsunami in History" from the book The F Word. I decided to take three quotes from the text and analyze them.

In Fear of Feminism Hogeland says so little but so much at the same time when she said "Our public culture in the U.S. presents myriad opportunities for women to take pleasure in being women--most often, however, that pleasure is used as an advertising or marketing strategy". The things that deem us "women" that distinctly make us different from men are the things being exploited. I think Dove maybe one of the biggest contenders in that arena but in a different way they put out ads such as this one

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vilUhBhNnQc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

why? Not because they truly care, I believe, about the issues at hand such as body image but because women will see these ads and believe Dove cares about them which in turn boosts their sales! The people that put these ads out know exactly what they're doing and what will garner the highest sales possible. 

The second quote is again from Fear of Feminism "Our culture allows women so little scope for development, for exploration, for testing the boundaries of what they can do and who they can be, that romantic and sexual relationships become the primary, too often the only, arena for selfhood" this makes me think about what was talked about in Cinderella Ate My Daughter how these Disney movies we watch as children shape our beliefs and ideas. The movies all have the same underlying ideas the "princess" has some type of conflict arise meets a man who they fall in love with and for the most part the man solves all the problems. We grow up thinking the most important goal is to fall in love with someone, get married, and have children I know when I was young that was the center of my attention more than what I was going to pursue as a career. It wasn't until about two years ago I had this realization I was genuinely happy as an independent person I didn't need to rely on anyone else to be happy. That was the same time I started taking my studies seriously and really buckling down because I wanted to make sure I would never need another person to get through life. 

The last quote comes from A Tsunami in History "What makes defining the third wave challenging is that not only is the shared label (feminism) missing, also missing is a shared movement that connects the factions of modern feminism and moves shared issues into the broad arena of popular concern." The first wave and second wave had a very united front they knew exactly what they were fighting for and why. The third wave is very divided there isn't a collective group that is fighting for something specific. There are many women who fight for many things until I read this I really didn't even know there was a third wave fighting for something. As much as we want to be independent we cant be just that until we band together and fight for what is right, whether it be equal pay, sexual reproduction, or any other issue but there has to be unity for this to be achieved. Until that happens we won't see the change we need and want.