i think NYT is telling me i’m right
March 17, 2008, 12:39 pm
in “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales,” the new york times sort of agrees with me that this spitzer thing might be the aha! moment many women (and men) needed to wake up from their “sexism isn’t that big of a deal anymore” haze.
Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?
Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.
…
“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”
speaking of the XX factor, does anyone else think it sort of sucks? i’m sure someone else has said this (in fact, it’s slate, so i’m sure they talked about it themselves in that narcissistic gen x meta thing they’re so good at), but the existence of a blog written by women seems condescending itself. is there something revealing about aggregating the mind vomit of slate’s female writers on political gender issues? is there something special about what they are saying because they are women? seems to pander to the dangerous “women and men are different, so we should treat them differently” argument that makes sexism so easy to accept.
but mostly, i dislike this blog b/c of asinine posts like “How Is Spitzer Different From Bill Clinton?” and “Spitzer: Pathos, Not Power.”
maybe if this blog actually contained smart commentary on gender issues (emphasis on “smart”), i’d complain a lot less. instead it’s a handful of great points mired in half-ass pseudo-intellectual dreck.