Feminism

I was encouraged recently when I heard a report on NPR that women voters are polling 18 percentage points in favor of President Obama over Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. However, I was also genuinely surprised, despite the recent outrageous debates by men in civil and religious positions of authority over a woman's right to practice birth control with her own body.

This is a time of very subdued feminism in America. This is disappointing to a older gay man like me. Loud feminism lifted the cause of gay rights in America in my youth.  Loud protests of women against racism, sexism, war and homophobia changed American society. However, the well-financed Thatcher and Reagan drumbeat of returning to "family values" in the name of Right Wing fiscal affluence muffled many stalwarts of the early feminist cause, as young women turned to materialism and executive-promotion ladders in the new corporate America. 

Perhaps the most stunning cultural blow to American feminism came with the Sex in the City woman, who is ironically a hedonistic gay man in a dress. The series was conceived and largely written by gay men, but was a huge success among young women. The media portrayal of the "successful" woman, as exemplified in exaggerated form by The Devil Wears Prada, is comparable to the portrayal of upwardly mobile men in the culture comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter and One, Two, Three.  

As a gay man, I know that quiet manipulation does not gain and maintain equal rights for a group which has been judged as "less than" for centuries. I also know that there is a wide middle path between reactionary riots and colluding silence. I see the modern American woman as diverging to the Right on that path. The patriarchal corporate structure will reward this. It will encourage women to become a new version of traditional heterosexual men. That will serve the corporate culture and also serve to disable women who see feminism as more than a negligible circumstance of birth. This has worked well with the gay rights movement. By normalizing gay men and lesbian women as gun-toting, marriageable folks just like every other American, the gay rights movement has been steered into the direction of materialist, corporate culture from its anti-war and feminist origins on the Left.

The lesson will eventually be revealed again that those who are exploited and oppressed by patriarchy and money. They will once again need to stand up and shout. The Occupy movement's rapid flare across the planet is a symptom of that smoldering fire of the human spirit. When women awaken from their satisfaction with mimicking heterosexual or gay men without really gaining respect as truly autonomous equals, the light of activist feminism will once again help guide the steps of global culture away from its current path to war and socioeconomic inequality.