Hellions by Maria Raha

Author:Maria Raha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group

In the 1990s, third-wave feminism ushered in new feminist misrepresentations by antifeminists whose careers had, arguably, benefited from feminist cultural advances. The movement itself was swept up in the fervor of Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment testimony against Clarence Thomas, and in the third wave’s signature focus: combating widespread rape and sexual abuse. Campuses and culture were replete with feminist-activist voices, women’s studies classes, and a new body of feminist literature and music. Everything from zines to punk rock made room for women’s voices, including inflammatory work by writers such as Katie Roiphe, whose 1994 book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism excoriated feminism’s approach to sexual violence. Camille Paglia, who published Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson in 1990 and Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays in 1992, spent the decade pushing buttons and loudly criticizing feminism while obsessively showering unabashed, slightly embarrassing praise on Madonna. And in 1995, Christina Hoff Sommers released Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. During the early ’90s, one would have thought the culture’s truly rebellious females were antifeminist—as if feminism were the nation’s standard viewpoint.

Media coverage of feminism and products of pop culture wavered between acknowledging feminism’s tremendous impact and anxiously wiping away anything that might threaten its own cultural power. In the late ’90s, the term “girl power” was ubiquitous on T-shirts after becoming the motto of the Spice Girls, another uncomfortable incarnation of pop culture’s forays into feminism in the form of five trendy, thin, beautiful women who sang heavily produced and sugary pop hits. They didn’t exactly make a good case for “girl power,” and they certainly weren’t rebels.

Pop culture constantly removes rebellion from the equation to avoid veering into the territory of questionable content; instead, it constructs its own diluted, safe version of feminism—call it “feminism lite.” Take, for instance, the twenty-year-old pattern of the glut of women’s glossies. Articles on careers, motherhood, rape, accepting one’s body type, overcoming the odds of being female, and increasing one’s sex drive are sprinkled in between advertisements and articles on dieting and cosmetics, preying on the very fears discussed in the magazines’ more conscious articles. The Lifetime and Oxygen television networks ostensibly offer “television for women,” as Lifetime’s catchphrase goes. The network packs its schedule with scads of programs about victims of violence, murder, and abuse, not to mention crafts and cooking, as well as advertising fare for cleaning solutions and traditional household and cosmetic products. Lifetime could remedy the problem by airing Hollywood hits featuring rebel women (or close facsimiles thereof), but instead opts for light and palatable twenty-year-old reruns of made-for-TV movies that have already been whitewashed to make women’s behavior and programming contents more acceptable.

Oxygen isn’t much different. It shows The Bad Girls Club, a reality program featuring women living together and behaving badly—and it never strays far from reality television’s cat-fighting female characters. The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency is another Oxygen staple, in which the charming, Botoxed, lifted, silicone-laden former supermodel rips her models’ bodies to shreds when she’s not wrangling assignments.

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