Grateful Gen Xer here! Thank you for a great talk and excellent points discussed.
Yes, 2nd wave feminism has had a hand in devaluing women’s bodies and it could certainly be argued that it intensified the usual growing pains of puberty for young girls and the experience of developing a woman’s body: the power it may assert as well as the perils and travails that befall it.
To these feminists women’s bodies were seen as the “locus of male oppression”, subject solely to “The Male Gaze” without the vital observation that women’s bodies are a source for good - gestation, motherhood, not to mention a very real sexual power that can be held over men by women through their physicality. I’m not talking about the politics of prostitution but rather the biological imperative and power of sexual power and attraction. How come? Because men’s sexual response is instinctive to visual sexual stimuli (due to their biology and our animal brain) while women are more sexually aroused by talk and touch because their biology and animal brain connects their sexuality and the act of sex to reproduction - a biological imperative that was an anathema to 2nd wave feminists, and something that is refuted by many women still. Sex was viewed as dangerous and oppressive to women instead of a normal, healthy shared communion.
The current trans ideology has forced the issue of biology and thus the differences between males and females to be made explicit to old school 2nd wave feminists.
It was an inconvenient truth for these feminists that women’s bodies are quite distinct from male bodies and the argument that women can do anything a man can involved, partly, a denial of biological and physical differences between the sexes. Mostly women can physically do anything a man can do, but not necessarily as effectively. The reasons as to why they hadn’t up until very recently can not simply be passed off ad being due to “oppression” and “The Patriarchy”. Furthermore, women’s femininity was viewed, at best, as a weakness, a handicap to female fulfilment and “equality” and a clarion call to oppression and physical attacks or even murder, at worst.
At the same time, over the past 30 years young girls have been fed the feminist myth that men are the enemy, masculinity is toxic and that all men are potential rapists. Add to that list the ideas that women are “more kind, socially adept, responsible, and generally better than men it’s no wonder that, since the advent of millennials, young girls don’t know whether it’s fantastic or fatal to be female: whether it’s better to be a boy in a man’s world or reject men altogether. Not to mention the confusion wrought in young boys by this pernicious ideology.
Also, let’s not overlook the fact that no matter how “strong” and “ dominant” the female matriarchs appear to be within the home in Pakistan, that may be because it is the only place they are allowed this dominance (where this power is safely constrained) and we know that women are also murdered in the streets. It is something of a taboo to point out to progressive liberals the treatment of women and homosexuals in Muslim countries because that doesn’t fit narrative of all “brown people” good aka victims: all whites bad, aka oppressors. That undeniable truth that fundamental Muslim cultures operates on a system most closely resembling patriarchal is not polite conversation. There is no “The Patriarchy”, there are only patriarchal cultures, which, most visibly are found in fundamentalist Muslim cultures.
Grateful Gen Xer here! Thank you for a great talk and excellent points discussed.
Yes, 2nd wave feminism has had a hand in devaluing women’s bodies and it could certainly be argued that it intensified the usual growing pains of puberty for young girls and the experience of developing a woman’s body: the power it may assert as well as the perils and travails that befall it.
To these feminists women’s bodies were seen as the “locus of male oppression”, subject solely to “The Male Gaze” without the vital observation that women’s bodies are a source for good - gestation, motherhood, not to mention a very real sexual power that can be held over men by women through their physicality. I’m not talking about the politics of prostitution but rather the biological imperative and power of sexual power and attraction. How come? Because men’s sexual response is instinctive to visual sexual stimuli (due to their biology and our animal brain) while women are more sexually aroused by talk and touch because their biology and animal brain connects their sexuality and the act of sex to reproduction - a biological imperative that was an anathema to 2nd wave feminists, and something that is refuted by many women still. Sex was viewed as dangerous and oppressive to women instead of a normal, healthy shared communion.
The current trans ideology has forced the issue of biology and thus the differences between males and females to be made explicit to old school 2nd wave feminists.
It was an inconvenient truth for these feminists that women’s bodies are quite distinct from male bodies and the argument that women can do anything a man can involved, partly, a denial of biological and physical differences between the sexes. Mostly women can physically do anything a man can do, but not necessarily as effectively. The reasons as to why they hadn’t up until very recently can not simply be passed off ad being due to “oppression” and “The Patriarchy”. Furthermore, women’s femininity was viewed, at best, as a weakness, a handicap to female fulfilment and “equality” and a clarion call to oppression and physical attacks or even murder, at worst.
At the same time, over the past 30 years young girls have been fed the feminist myth that men are the enemy, masculinity is toxic and that all men are potential rapists. Add to that list the ideas that women are “more kind, socially adept, responsible, and generally better than men it’s no wonder that, since the advent of millennials, young girls don’t know whether it’s fantastic or fatal to be female: whether it’s better to be a boy in a man’s world or reject men altogether. Not to mention the confusion wrought in young boys by this pernicious ideology.
Also, let’s not overlook the fact that no matter how “strong” and “ dominant” the female matriarchs appear to be within the home in Pakistan, that may be because it is the only place they are allowed this dominance (where this power is safely constrained) and we know that women are also murdered in the streets. It is something of a taboo to point out to progressive liberals the treatment of women and homosexuals in Muslim countries because that doesn’t fit narrative of all “brown people” good aka victims: all whites bad, aka oppressors. That undeniable truth that fundamental Muslim cultures operates on a system most closely resembling patriarchal is not polite conversation. There is no “The Patriarchy”, there are only patriarchal cultures, which, most visibly are found in fundamentalist Muslim cultures.
Second wave was from the 70’s.
Glad to have found your Substack, Jodi
Betty.