In retrospect, that I was ill-suited for the rigors of feminist duty should have been obvious. I do not care about abortion politics. I am incapable of handing out condoms. I silently curse any man who does not open the door for me. I have, however, always possessed a strong aversion to the color pink, and as a teenager feminism attached a sense of purpose to my color convictions: intelligent and serious women did not wear pink. Although Time Magazine had proclaimed feminism legally dead in 1998, I went on fancying myself something of a secret feminist throughout my high school years; and with my invisible badge came the certainty that I was intellectually and morally superior to everyone around me.

However, unbeknownst to me, it was precisely around this time that Pink was undergoing reconstructive surgery and either was or was not becoming the color of female empowerment. A quick perusal of current feminist websites (e.g. Feminist Majority Leadership Association, CodePink, Ms. Magazine, etc.) reveals nothing short of a blitzkrieg to Take Back the Pink! The victory of which, in large part, unfurled the banner beneath which the “Third Wave” of feminism rolled into town, with some notable modifications to the idea of ‘what a feminist looks like.’ I have, as of yet, been unable to find an explanation for the profound shift in sentiment towards pink, and many feminists, mainly of the older generation, continue to object to the hue on gender-political grounds. Nevertheless, pink is now the color, the cause célèbre and the raison d'être, of feminism. Unfortunately, five years ago, I knew of no such development, and so one day found myself sitting alone at table inside the UNC Wilmington’s Student Union, wearing jeans and a ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirt, in the early throes of an identity crisis.

I – The Situation

Two weeks earlier, one of March’s pleasantly bipolar winter/spring days found me in the midst of a ten-hour cram-session for a paper on rape as a weapon of war. I had stepped out of the library for some fresh air and there beneath the sun’s oppressive glare I sat, suffering from severe eyestrain, battling the general malaise which typically follows extended readings of Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International reports. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a large tree on the grassy knoll in front of the library. It was a very low-budget, very middle-school-science-fair display, twelve-feet tall and ornamented with hundreds of baby dolls. As I approached the tree and its meager congregation, a toweringly ominous grey-bearded man in long black cloak with a Jack Russell terrier at his feet yelled into a megaphone, “In the United States 4000 babies are killed a day!” I froze. Feigning nonchalance, I cautiously peered out of what was left of my peripheral vision to find a Pro-Life University Students Present ‘The Life Tree’ banner, various posters listing abortion statistics and Morning After Pill = Murder picket signs. Several of the demonstrators had lynched baby dolls spackled with red paint around their necks.

I abruptly left the fetus-bearing arboreal monstrosity, muttering a few choice obscenities under my breath, mumbling something about the tree being a monument to their collective ignorance, cursing the first amendment. My anger stemmed not from what they were saying, but rather how and where they chose to say it: a dead-baby tree in front of the library where conscientious students such as myself liked to relax during endless days in the library and enjoy the sun on our faces while we talked about Jack Kerouac. Save the hate speech for the Student Union—where the great unlearned fraternize and plot mixers. And since I could think of nothing else worth fighting for, I went in search of the opposition.

About fifteen young women showed up for the Voices for Planned Parenthood (VOX) meeting at the library café. It was Back Up Your Birth Control Week and an attractive and petite blonde explained VOX’s agenda as follows: First, to promote the use of contraceptives. Second, to promote awareness of Plan-B, aka The Morning-After Pill. She continued, “Last night we successfully passed out 2000 condoms downtown… Tonight meet at ten outside Olive ‘r Twist.” (I’d always thought it unfortunate for a martini bar of such an innocent nomenclature to be the preferred hangout of parasitic bacterium and viral papules.) I sat silently. I had no intention of being seen outside Olive ‘r Twist nor of handing out condoms to drunken frat boys. The problem, as I saw it, was that Olive ‘r Twist was located in the heart of the bourgeois-bohemian latte district of Wilmington, NC. We were not exactly talking sub-Saharan Africa, nor of ten blocks south and slightly west where a great many people did have to choose between using condoms and eating dinner. I did not buy into the old song and dance about how women viewing sex the same way men do equals empowerment. My entire life, I have not had a single female friend who woke up the morning after feeling liberated and ready to conquer the world. I have, however, listened to my fair share of phone calls from would-be ‘liberated’ females who were feeling less liberated and more mortified or ashamed or embarrassed or used or whatever. I left the meeting without saying anything, feeling less empowered and more confused. 

            The Feminist Majority Leadership Association (FMLA) seemed more promising because it had a screening-process: an interview with the faculty advisor to explain my credentials and why I wanted to join. Dr. Kathleen Berkeley’s office was inspiring.  Urgency in all directions, from the stacks of books that could not fit on the shelves to the plethora of placards and posters and protest paraphernalia, it was propagandistically intoxicating. I imagined it was 1971 and the amicus curiae briefs had not yet been filed for Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, I arrived at the FMLA meeting a week later to find the same girls from VOX. Several eyeballed me suspiciously, perhaps suspecting me of pro-life espionage. I braced myself for another walk of shame, but pizzas were delivered and the meeting began without event. Everyone took out their scripts and began rehearsing The Vagina Monologues. Half were self-conscious and timid; the other half liked saying “vagina” a little too much for my taste, but I could at least appreciate what they were trying to do. Shortly after the rehearsal a sheet for tabling landed in front of me. I signed up for the 11:40-12:00 slot the next morning and passed the sheet along. I assumed it was to sell tickets.

            There was a big commotion in the far corner of the room as two large boxes were lifted onto a table. The president pulled a lollipop from one of the boxes in manner reminiscent of Wart dislodging Excalibur in The Sword in the Stone. Everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed and giggled and shimmied about. They passed a lollipop around the table for everyone to have closer look. Moments later it landed in my hands. Flabbergasted, I found myself staring at a pink-chocolate vagina on a stick. “It’s a pussy pop,” the girl sitting next to me said plaintively. My eyes reflexively widened. “Oh,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant, offering my most sincere fake-laugh, feeling everyone’s eyes upon me, realizing I had just signed up to sell these things at a table in the student union.

            The next morning I, reluctantly, showed up at the table to sell the vaginas as instructed in a feminist-themed shirt borrowed from a friend. Despite a sincere effort to harness my just-like-ripping-off-a-band-aid attitude, one look at the table full of “politically correct” pink and brown vaginas found me resenting this business of being a woman. The whole spectacle looked like an endorsement for female genital mutilation. I sat behind the table juxtaposing in my mind an image of prison guards force-feeding suffragist Alice Paul on hunger strike with one of me, sitting at a booth in the Student Union peddling pussy pops.

            For twenty minutes not a single female bought a lollipop. A few approached the table apprehensively, but upon seeing “Pussy Pops 4 Sale” swiftly scurried away. Males, on the other hand, truly appreciated the gesture: they laughed and called their friends over and bought vaginas by the handfuls, ceremoniously unwrapping the ethnically diverse effigies and deflowering them on the spot, attempting to demonstrate to every female within proximity that they knew how to show us a good time. Then a guy in a light-pink polo shirt, a Tau Omega hat on his head and penny loafers on his feet, a vag-sicle pressed firmly between his lips and handful of spare vaginas in his sweaty palm, asked me out. At that precise moment I realized selling vaginas was more than just a complete waste of my time. This strange breed of vagina-selling in-your-face feminism was more than quixotic, it was potentially catastrophic: it was turning otherwise respectable and intelligent young women into shallow exhibitionists looking for cheap thrills and special recognition for something they (unless transsexual) sacrificed nothing to achieve.

II – The Reason

I was, like many members of my generation, a victim of the romanticization of the 1960s: the protests, the sit-ins, the marches on Washington—the apocalyptical urgency of it all. I would read glorious tales of Yippies dumping one-dollar bills off the NYSE balcony to watch the daytraders drop everything and scurry over top of one another, and wish I’d been there, or that I could be part of something so poignant. I would listen to the “The Times they Are a Changin’” over and over and over again yearn for relevancy. I became distraught upon reading how Hoffman had committed suicide in 1989; inconsolable from the bitter realization that the Yippies and the SDS and the Freedom Rides and the Pranksters were gone to history and I would never be a part of them. But then here was Feminism. What I should have known was for it to all of the sudden be so pertinent again meant that something had been lost, but the hopelessly idealistic are seldom prone to such a panoramic worldview. They are, more or less, like the horses that pull the carriages around Central Park: blinders are both an occupational necessity and a hazard. The objective is to stay focused, maintain steady pace, ignore distractions, not to spook nor become hysterical. Yet, the objective reality of the situation is that they are in constant danger of being blindsighted. I suppose this is why there is not a more pitiable creature on the face of this earth than the Central Park thoroughbred; they alone can comprehend the inexorable anxieties wrought by such a handicapped point of view. And in that way, for the individual, feminism has become the rust on the razor that threatened Maya Angelou’s throat, “in many ways an unnecessary insult.”

So appealing was the notion that I was oppressed; so grand was my vision of myself on the front lines with picket sign drawn at my oppressor, that it never struck me as odd that in all of this revolutionary daydreaming the writing on my placard was always conspicuously obscured beyond legibility, the face of my nemesis always blurred beyond recognition. It seems I was not alone: “People always ask us what the most important issue is, and my response is, name an issue. If that’s what you’re interested in, then it’s the most important,” charged feminist frontwoman Jennifer Baumgardner in a 2000 interview. The most striking aspect of her comment is not the unabashedly solipsistic attempts of the leadership to substitute mass appeal for direction, but rather that so many young women have to ask what is important in the first place. Unfortunately, mass appeal by standing for nothing in particular does not constitute solidarity; which, paradoxically, is what so many young women are hoping to find in signing on feminism’s dotted line.

To help forge the illusion of solidarity, the academic wing has adopted the usage of the plural feminisms to incorporate the following sub-sects: liberal feminism, social feminism, radical feminism, separatist feminism, cultural feminism (lifestyle feminism), black feminism, chicana feminism, Muslim feminism, sex-positive feminism, lesbian feminism, ecofeminism, Lipstick feminism (self-professed “slut” feminism), Amazon Feminism, fat-positive feminism, Individualistic feminism, Pro-Life Feminism, Third World Feminism, cyberfeminism... To move forward from here we can either accept the official decree by feminists that feminisms is the product of the monolithic Second Wave’s failure to save a place at the lunch table for black and other women of color, lesbians, transsexuals, and all other aforementioned marginalized demographics; or we can accept the view that feminisms amounts to little more than clever niche marketing of the same lame product wherein the only thing that changes is the packaging. Or both, for as Jennifer Baumgardner writes in Manifesta about feminism’s success in lobbying Mattel, “As utterly important as it is to have [Barbie] dolls that reflect the different faces besides that of the Aryan goddess, the PC-inspired dolls were never quite as popular as the original.” Ouch. The point here seems to be that, most of the time, when a movement fails to address the needs and concerns of at least thirty sub-sectors of the population it purportedly speaks for, it ceases to be a movement and becomes, rather, a plank worth jumping off of. 

Which is probably why the current trend in the literature of the movement has been away from the intellectual side of things, and towards convincing all women they are feminists. In Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrrls Gone Wild, Jennifer Bumgarder and Deborah Siegel write, “Feminist the movement and feminist the identity has never been an easy sell,” and “the current sales quandary—that of selling the movement to the young—is but the latest in a long line of attempts to mainstream a hotly contested cause.”  The lengths to which feminism has gone to “mainstream” this “hotly contested cause” can be found in the November issue of Skirt! magazine entitled, “Do Feminism and Cosmetic Surgery Mix?” Kelly Finley, a professor of Gender Studies at UNC Charlotte, writes to us from academia:

“This is What a Feminist Looks Like” reads my t-shirt. Proudly perched underneath are my two new boobs. That’s right. I’m a feminist who got a boob job…and I love “the girls.” I love how they finally fill a bra and bounce when I run. But I’ll confess, I debated with myself for years, wondering: Can a feminist get a boob job?

I suppose the silver lining is that now Miss Finley’s mind is free to tackle the trade deficit. Obscure as the logic behind her argument may be, the message is clear: there are no restrictions to being a feminist these days. The movement’s literature presents something of a strange, but inevitable, hybrid: chick-lit meets self-help. It is sassy and superficially irreverent, appeals to insecurities and perceived flaws, and always hints at containing within its pages some self-affirming secret, some revelatory key to empowerment. At its most desperate, it reads like an advertisement for a weight-loss supplement, such as in the following excerpt from Jessica Valenti’s Full-Frontal Feminism:

Do you think it’s fair that a guy will make more money doing the same job as you? Does it piss you off and scare you when you find out about your friends getting raped? Did you ever feel like shit about your body? Do you ever …Well, my friend, I hate to break it to you, but you’re a hardcore feminist. I swear.

The first sentence presents something of a curious non-sequitur, but for now I shall let it slide. One finds it difficult to imagine anyone, male or female, who would remain indifferent to the rape of a friend. Also troublesome is whether a woman who blames her negative body image on someone else’s notion of beauty is capable of ever having a positive body image. But most vexing of all is what precisely financial equality, rape, and standards of beauty have to do with one another. And so it appears that to be a feminist one must first accept oneself as the victim, the “hardcore” victim.

In regards to the victimization proclamation I can only offer the following: I learned during my brief stint with the feminists in 2005 of something called the Equal Rights Amendment. That it had not been ratified came as a shock not because I saw it as a necessary piece of legislation, but because everything up until that point had lead me to believe that it was already there.[1] In my twenty-two years it never occurred to me that the playing field was not equal. In fact, the only thing I was ever told I could not do was joining the wrestling team. When I asked why, the wrestling coach replied, “Because I can’t coach a girl. So, if you joined the team, I’d have to quit.” The overt sexism did not register, nor did the notion that I was being discriminated against. Instead what I heard was that I could join the team if I wanted, but the school would have to find a new coach because there was some vague law preventing men from coaching females in wrestling. It made sense. I did not want him to lose his job. Especially not since my interest in wrestling had less to do with interest in the sport and more to do with interest in a boy named Keith, the scraggly bow-legged star of the JV wrestling team. The point is that even when confronted with blatant bigotry, I still perceived myself as having the upper hand. I held the fate of the wrestling coach in my hands, all I had to do was to say ‘yes, I want to join the team,’ and he was gone. If I were a feminist I would probably offer up this story as Exhibit A at “consciousness-raising” seminars, I would point to my naivete and my inability to fathom discrimination, to the failure of Title IX and the triumph of sexism, to the cunning of my oppressor and how he had made me feel like there was something wrong with a girl interested in the sport of wrestling. But I like my version better. I like myself as the benevolent dictator in a world of my own making, weighing the options of Keith’s attention and a man’s livelihood in my hands and exercising better judgment. I like the version where my sense of self-respect, empowerment’s only prerequisite, remains intact. Unfortunately, as time passes a girl’s innate sense of self-respect gives way as occasions for self-pity multiply and she begins to settle for self-confidence and self-esteem. And so to “empower” herself, the modern-day feminist must abandon her own perceptions and experiences and individual history and start thinking in abstractions and dealing in hypotheticals. She must internalize the plight of the illusory “everywoman.” She must, in a very real sense, forget what it is to be her.

The tragically quixotic nature of a woman with no self-respect dedicating her life to achieving respect for all women is a subject much to complex for this inquiry. I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with embracing one’s victimhood, as long as one is very clear on who is to blame. However, with feminism, the perpetrator seems both everywhere and nowhere at once. Do we blame the rapist, or the legal system with its unjust statutes of limitation, or the municipal government for the poorly lit sidewalk and apathetic (mostly male) police force and underfunded crisis centers? Do we blame the anorexic starlet, the media who created her, or the society who adores her? The most common answer to these questions goes something along the lines of, ‘well, all of the above, sort of.’ But where social change is concerned if it is all of the above, then it might as well be none of the above. In the absence of anyone to blame social movements tend to lack the necessary direction; and it is precisely this lack of direction that allows the modern feminist to be both for and against everything that feminism may or may not stand for, or against.

III – Too Many Choices

“Choice” has become the only thing feminists are capable of agreeing on these days. In round table discussions whenever a would-be revolutionary gets tangled up in her own rhetoric she always recovers with “really, it’s about the choice,” and all of the other panelists nod in rote complacency; at feminist rallies the applause lines are always structured around demands for “choice”; at vigils and gatherings of a more somber tone it is evocatively whispered, “choice,” and a revered hush falls over the crowd. Though the allusion is to abortion, choice itself has become feminism’s preferred stance on everything else, including the three traditional touchstones of feminist doctrine: anti-domestication, anti-war, pro-abortion.

Betty Freidan painted housewives as victims needing liberation. Later the movement ridiculed them, declared them subhuman, reviled them as wicked Jezebels consciously enabling society’s chauvinism. Now, whether ‘tis feminist or not to be a stay-at-home-mom is a matter of choice. The about-face was abrupt, and the reasons for it can be found in an October 2003 New York Times article entitled “The Opt-Out Revolution.” The article revealed numerous studies showing that an increasing number of well-educated young women were opting-out of their careers to stay at home with their children. In 2003, feminists pounced on the counter-offensive and tried, quite obnoxiously, to redub it the “cop-out” movement. It didn’t catch and fearing its own impending irrelevancy, and also sensing opportunity, feminism quickly changed its tune. The fall 2009 issue of Ms. Magazine bore the following headline: “Mom 2.0: She blogs, She tweets, She rises up!” The Ms. article heralds a full-scale embrace of what we are now told is the “mothers’ movement.” And we are left wondering if feminism yet again wishes to amend the definition of social movement to include: a bunch of women blogging about nothing in particular. Full-time mothers are both lauded for and encouraged to “make the personal into the political” in their spare time as a means to fill the void of what is still (though more subtly) portrayed as the ever-oppressive and ultimately unfulfilling life of a stay-at-home-mom. Questionable is what possible insight feminism has to offer the woman who has made the decision to be stay-at-home mom. Not necessarily because of the forty years worth of literature aimed at convincing her she is miserable, but rather the simple fact that by demonstrating real decision-making capabilities in choosing to stay at home, such a woman has already proven herself too psychologically advanced for this ideology of indecision.

But it was really in their championing of a woman’s right to combat, to full equality in the military, that feminism shot itself in the ideological foot. This self-inflicted and now gaping wound in the flesh of moral consistency proved ultimately gangrenous and currently allows for remarks such as the following:

I support the troops, but not in the I-support-the-troops-but-I’m-against-the-war kind of way. I mean I literally support the troops. I mean I really feel empathy for what they are going through. And this enormous sacrifice they are making. And it’s painful to me…at the same time I feel hamstrung because I don’t want to diminish their sacrifice… I don’t feel that there is a cohesive antiwar movement.

The above circumlocution is Jennifer Baumgardner speaking at a round table discussion commemorating the 98^th anniversary of International Women’s Day, and presents a vivid portrait of the rhetorical drowning so frequent in feminist discussions these days. Linda Martin-Alcott, another member of the panel, disagreed to the degree that their shared ideology permits, “feminism has always been at the forefront of the anti-war movement,” she says, and then asks, “Do women have a right to combat in an imperial army?” as a sort of sarcastic rhetorical surrender. Her sarcasm implies that this is a “hotly-contested” issue within the movement, which presents problems. But that the question is presented as a rhetorical one presents worse problems, implying that this is some great riddle where the answer is always different and always right because it depends on individual perspective, like some tree falling in the woods with no one around. But a belief in the right to take someone else’s life for one’s country is a moral absolute regardless of the war, regardless of the soldier’s gender. And when one considers the social cost of war, the billions and billions of dollars spent arming and maintaining the military instead of on such areas we are repeatedly told are the forefront of feminism agenda—universal health care, affordable housing, better public education—to demand full equality for women within the American Military-Industrial Complex is a perversion of the very notion of the social movement so severe it is difficult to wrap one’s mind around it. I imagine it is a bit like if the Civil Rights Movement had decided to “mainstream” their “hotly-contested” cause by changing their demands to the right to work at segregated lunch counters because of the many opportunities it could provide for some of them. Or, if Martin Luther King had told fellow civil rights workers that whether segregation was right or wrong was a matter of choice that every civil rights worker must make for himself.

The most peculiar development, however, is that feminism is no longer exclusively pro-choice, but rather includes the choice of whether or not to be Pro-choice. This presents serious problems of cohesion. As Stanley Fish wrote in the February 1996 issue of First Things magazine:

A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against God who infuses life at the moment of conception; a pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs. No conversation between them can ever get started because each of them starts from a different place and they could never agree as to what they were conversing about.

Although there is something about the feminist adoption of a Pro-Life wing which seems very enlightenment, very “Friends of Voltaire,” very I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to be pro-life and feminist, one imagines the choice to be anti-choice is for many gray-haired feminists as painful as it was for the Beatles to lose the rights to their songs. We may speculate, we may empathize and form allegiances in our heads, but most us will never know what it is like to have one’s life work stolen out from underneath, hijacked by some profiteer. However, as members of society sooner or later we are all subjected to the consequences: Target’s satanic twist on Hello Good-“Buy” monsooned my childhood memories of family beach-trips in a tan conversion-van with my siblings and I dancing around in the back like adorable little idiots screaming “Hel-lo-good-bye-Hel-lo-Good-bye.” Now, whenever I hear the song, it is not sweet nostalgia which dances about in my mind, but rather that infernal soul-sucking red bulls-eye with the word BUY emblazoned over top of it. Their loss, in a very real sense, becomes ours. So although I do not care about abortion and although I find the absurd notion of a Pro-Life Feminist sincerely satire-worthy, I am deeply troubled by this wanton disregard for irreconcilable differences. I have profound respect for irreconcilable differences, tend as they do to color an individual’s choices in moral absolutes and therefore render them easier to make.

IV – And So It Goes

But feminism is not about actually making choices, but simply about having them. And since the biggest impediment to a course of action is too many choices, the result has been psychosomatic paralysis with schizophrenic tendencies. The modern day feminist is left wanting it all because she has no idea who she is. Perhaps if in its neverending quest for relevancy, feminism was not so dependent on stripping young women of their identities in the first place, then women would not feel the need to be so many things: the virgin and the whore; the ball-busting career woman and the full-time mother; “the subject and the object,” the practical idealist. We are sold on the idea of the reconciliation of our inner opposites, to achieve balance, to find common ground, compromise. We forget that there is a word for people who express belief in one set of principles but act according to another. The problem with a female professor who uses feminism to justify a boob job is not so much that it makes her a hypocrite, but rather that it does not. And yet, despite the empowerment being a feminist has bestowed upon her, and despite the self-confidence breast-augmentation surgery has secured for her, and despite the satisfaction gained from the reconciliation of these two opposing forces of her being, she is still left feeling the need to justify herself. Perhaps if in lieu of embracing our inner victims, women chose self-respect, we would not find ourselves so preoccupied with what other people think of us, or with “being taken seriously.”

Everybody knows “being taken seriously” is an abstraction reserved for those who do not have to ask for it, and likewise demanding it is the simplest way to ensure that one never will be. And so for feminism it is the cause that keeps on giving. That a great many powerful women are taken seriously we are told is irrelevant, because “women who are in power are forced to act like men.” For example any of the three female U.S. Secretaries of State, who according to Linda Martin-Alcott, among others, did not use their “gender-lenses” to oppose war because it would have resulted in their marginalization as “women’s advocates.” Ah, the ability to see all women through rose-colored glasses, to believe deep down that Madeline Albright did not really think starving half a million children in Iraq was “worth it,” but was merely trying to be taken seriously. With shockingly little effort Albright becomes the victim, and not the 500,000 innocent children who starved to death in the desert. One cannot help but wonder why there are not more women in high-level political appointments—not because they are especially intelligent and qualified, nor because feminism has succeeded in shattering so many glass-ceilings—because they have proven themselves to be indestructible assets in the politics of diversion. What was Waco if not a manifestation of Janet Reno’s woeful desire to be taken seriously? Are not all criticisms of Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi the product of thinly veiled sexism? It gets worse when we consider that feminism provided the means by which Sarah Palin was ever of any interest to anyone at all: the embodiment of the new Female-American Dream to have it all—the family life and the high-profile career, the hundred-thousand dollar wardrobe and the personal armory, every dimwitted cliché turned into a middle-American catch-phrase, the hockey mom suddenly the center of everyman’s attention, being taken seriously. “Yes, but is she really a feminist?”  Meanwhile Condoleeza Rice is given the I-may-disagree-with-your-politics-but-glass-ceilings-be-damned nudge of the elbow, nod of the head, wink of the eye. All of which seems to be rooted in the preferred tropism of anti-war group CodePink and women across America engaged in heated political discussions: If women ran the world, there would be no war. Nevermind Isabella and the Spanish Inquisition or Thatcher and The Falklands or Rwanda’s Ex-Minister of Family and Women’s Affairs Pauline Nyiramasuhuko instructing soldiers to rape seventy women before they set them on fire. Were they all victims of the male-dominated power structure a la Lindy England into which they were forced to act accordingly in order to be taken seriously? I wonder. What if Ilse Koch was the Director of NHS, or Belle Gunness headed up the Department of Social Services, would discussions still gravitate towards glass ceilings? I wonder. The only people harmed by the rampant circulation of this insidious fallacy are women. Not because it makes us look especially stupid and incapable of individual insight, but because it contradicts something that we all know to be true: the meanest and most calculating person we all know is female.

We are taught in this way to betray ourselves.

            When we look to –isms to define who we are, we allow them to dictate our words and our thoughts, to manipulate our desires and our actions; our own lives become somewhat beside the point. We begin forming attachments not upon what we think of a particular situation, but rather what those attachments say about us as “individuals.” We forget that any and all such attachments come at a cost to the individual. So we advertise our affiliations in order to recoup internal losses with external validation: a bumper sticker, a t-shirt, a deactivated birth-control necklace. We forget that just because a shirt has words on it does not mean that it says something. We forget that it should not matter what a feminist looks like. It is not surprising that the catchword among feminists these days is “disconnect,” a verb that became a noun in the seventies, when it was officially robbed of movement. A pawn waiting to be moved forward (or left or right from a spectator’s point of view), advised in the meantime to make “the personal into the political,” and in doing so has allowed the political to dictate the personal, and everything seems to have lost its relevance. Writing in 1976 Joan Didion remarked that the women’s movement was “no longer a cause but a symptom.” It seems feminism is no longer a symptom, but a syndrome.