Perfect Madness by Judith Warner

Author:Judith Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

FEMINISM IN THE AGE OF NARCISSISM

Turning away from the public realm, replacing social consciousness with an exclusive focus on self, had been the norm in American society since the late 1970s. The “culture of narcissism,” characterized by a “retreat from politics and repudiation of the recent past” that Christopher Lasch detailed in his 1978 book of that name, was the only political culture many of us ever knew. By the time we were aware enough to think about it, the political currents of the late 1960s and early 1970s had become little more in our lives than the psychedelic plastic Peace and Love signs we stuck in the backs of our closets, or the crying-Indian public service announcements we remembered from Saturday morning TV.

The grand social visions of a Great Society had petered out, by the time of our teens, into the tightfisted rugged individualism of Reaganomics. The more socially aware, activist political culture that had hummed in the background of our childhoods was, by the time we were teenagers, getting to seem as out of style—as tacky, even—as platform shoes and bell-bottoms. The look of our generation was Ray-Bans and oxford-cloth button-down shirts. The sound of our generation was arrogance and irony. The book of our generation was Less Than Zero. The man of our generation was Ronald Reagan. The emotional reality of our generation was the coming-of-age of the “diminishing expectations” Lasch had identified a decade earlier. Children under Nixon, we did not believe in government (and neither did our elected leaders). Children of divorce, we did not believe in relationships. Our songs were defiantly not about love. It was an age of “ironic hopelessness,” wrote eighties novelist David Leavitt.

What we did believe in was money and our own power to succeed. We voted overwhelmingly to reelect Ronald Reagan in 1984—ring- ingly endorsing his “small-government” policies that would, or so it was promised, allow us to pursue success unchecked and reap the maximum rewards for our efforts. Our lack of belief in just about anything larger than ourselves or money did not go unnoticed. As David Lipsky and Alexander Abrams wrote in their 1994 book, Late Bloomers: Coming of Age in Today’s America, “The worry about people of our age was that we were too single-minded, too careerist. That we had no values at all, except for achieving our own ends.”

We weren’t big on social activism. We weren’t exactly civic-minded. There were exceptions, of course: those among us who campaigned for nuclear disarmament or pushed our universities to divest themselves of investments in South Africa. But they sounded, in the air of the times, somewhat tinny, somewhat off.

The women of our generation rode into their professional futures on the backs of the women who had come before them, thumbing our noses at them all the while. This was not lost on slightly older feminist commentators like the communications professor Susan Douglas, who, in her 1994 cultural memoir of feminism and the media, Where the Girls Are, excoriated the

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