I hate to be a pest, but …

Yes, depressing in the extreme.

At the first approximation, the answer to the question “why have gay rights made so much more progress than women’s rights?” has to be “because a lot of gay people turned out to be wealthy white male conservatives or related to them, see Ken Mehlman, Andrew Sullivan, the son of Reagan, the daughter of Cheney, the children of Senator Blowhard, etc. etc.”

But that simply restates the point that sexism is a much more deeply entrenched problem, as it turns out, than even homophobia.

Draft the html, and being in a hurry. I was trying to add “and sisters” to Maria’s sentence, as is probably obvious enough. If anyone who can tinker wants to, feel free to correct it.

I have no intention of arguing over which prejudice is more entrenched. It is manifestly clear, and a matter of public record, that much faster and more sweeping changes have occurred in public attitudes towards gay people over the last few decades than have occurred in public attitudes towards women. (At least in the US.) Any argument about it would be entirely superfluous.

“Any argument about it would be entirely superfluous.”

Well glad you decided that.

do we have to turn this into the oppression Olympics

“We” don’t “have to” do anything. Reading and commenting here are totally voluntary.

I would love to see a study of how many times the women CTers are told that they shouldn’t be talking about what they’re talking about, they should be talking about something else, as compared to how many times the men get that same treatment.

Anyhow, following up on what pedant wrote: as both a woman (more or less) and a gay person, I think it’s fascinating to try and dig out why the pace and character of change (at least in the US) has been so different in relation to women and gays in my lifetime. (Not to mention racism….) Recognizing the phenomena and trying to understand the reasons for them might even turn out to be useful.

Maybe the difference is that the old conservative party line about LGBTQ people was (1) they don’t exist and (2) maybe there are some individual perverts, but we can fix that by prosecuting them as criminals. Kind of like a dike that was designed to exclude LGBTQ people entirely from civil society.

That position, for all its strength, was very brittle. Very oppressive while it lasted, but once the water started flowing in, the whole position was bound to collapse. It didn’t allow for a selective retreat.

The old conservative position on women was more flexible. No dike—no one ever wanted to exclude women from society entirely. The goal was to limit their scope, and what you want for that is something like a spider’s web. Each strand contributes; each one is hard to see and needs pointing out; each is as strong as steel if you try to break it. None of them, on its own, is too intrusive—it’s the cumulative effect that really does the job.

In fact, each strand is a comfort to someone who has been constrained by it for so long she thinks she needs it for support. (And perhaps she does, after all that time. Perhaps it would be cruel to take it from her. That doesn’t make things easier for anyone.)

How’s anyone supposed to take out a web like that? Now and then, you knock out this strand or that, but no individual victory accomplishes all that much. And meanwhile the conservative spiders are crawling all around, denying that the strands were ever there, all the time spinning them back again ….

“I would love to see a study of how many times the women CTers are told that they shouldn’t be talking about what they’re talking about, they should be talking about something else, as compared to how many times the men get that same treatment.”

Looking back at my comment I can see how it could have been taken as trying to tell Maria what she should be talking about. I wasn’t really thinking about it that way but “intentions are not magic”.

Apologies.

Part of the issue is that notions like equality, feminism, etc. mean different things to different people. It’s not necessarily productive to start with one’s own (personal) idealised notion of what that means, then ask why society hasn’t moved enough towards it. Sometimes it’s better to ask why this-or-that particular change has or hasn’t happened. From that point of view, it seems clear that:

1. Compared to the OP’s vision of feminism, the success of the gay rights movement has been in much more modest demands, which ultimately amount to “leave us be.” There were (and are) some people with more radical demands, but these have largely made no progress at all. Gay rights hasn’t required non-gay people to do much at all – this is a much easier sell than a version of feminism that requires huge changes to non-feminists’ lives.

2. There is much more consensus as to gay rights. For example, lots of people consider themselves feminists but have no problem with Brazilian waxes or Page Three, whereas the OP views them as a problem. And these differing views of the content of equality are so pronounced that many (most?) women don’t consider themselves feminists. If many or most gay people had opposed the gay rights movement, it would have surely had more difficulty.

@pedant 1: it turns out that the number of women who are white rich males is surprisingly low.

Jokes apart, I think that a big difference is that almost all gay are strongly pro gay rights, whereas in my experience a lot of women are not feminist at all.

“when they actually stopped thinking gay people were weird, icky and in some pre-ordained way destined to live short, unhappy lives, outside of the natural bonds of romance, matrimony and dullness,”

Some people may be old enough to remember the days that the gay liberation movement was not about trying to live lives inside the “natural bonds of romance, matrimony, and dullness.”

The gay liberation movement was not a movement that sought to the social acceptance of the replication of heterosexual patterns of life among gay people. Gay liberation was a movement that celebrated free love (or promiscuity, take your pick). It did not view monogamous pair-bonding and child-rearing as desirable norms. You may remember the days when gay people referred to straight people as “breeders.”

The major sites of gay liberation were bars and bathhouses, and anonymous sex was not merely acceptable but advocated.

Gay liberation has been replaced by gay rights, which is far more conservative in its goals. I don’t say this as a criticism – my own personal life is profoundly conservative – but as a description.

And the cause of the change was AIDS, which decimated and utterly demoralized the organized gay community, and made anonymous, promiscuous sex a source of sickness and death instead of creativity and life.

The gay rights movement that emerged from the ashes of the AIDS catastrophe is utterly different from the gay liberation movement. It does not aspire to change the world. Its agenda is the acceptance of middle-class gay people as no different from middle class straight people. Not merely the equals of, but no different from, straight people.

You can see this in the two main goals of the gay rights movement in the US. One is gay marriage, the right to enter into paired relationships that subject one’s personal life (including one’s assets, home and income) to government regulation, so that gay people can establish state-sanctioned arrangements that are more or less identical to those of straight people. Maria calls these relationships “natural,” although historically they were rejected as entirely unnatural by most original feminists and by the leaders of the gay liberation movement.

The other is the right of gay people to serve openly in the military: to and fight and kill and die in the service of American imperialism, as the gay liberation movement would have viewed it..

The current conservative gay rights movement is completely unthreatening to straight Americans as they actually live their lives. What they find when they give up their prejudices is that nothing happens to them at all.

Contrary to the ravings of the fundamentalists, gay rights threatens no one’s marriage and has no effect on anyone’s ability to raise their own children. If you are straight, then gay marriage happens to other people. If you are straight with a gay child, then public acceptance of gay people turns out to be a relief, not a threat.

But feminism cannot be unthreatening in this way. Feminism must necessarily transform every marriage, every sexual or “romantic” (to use Maria’s word) relationship, every parenting relationship. It cannot only be about the rights of a minority, because it demands a change in the interactions of everyone. It really does threaten to change the personal lives of the fundamentalists, along with everyone else, and they are right to fear it.

That is, I suggest, why a relatively quick and painless sea change was possible for gay rights, but not for women’s rights.

Lurker’s impression that “almost all gay[s] are strongly pro gay rights” may possibly be true today, when “gay” and “gay rights” are relatively well-defined and (as is observed above) the tide of opinion has swung so quickly in favor of the latter. But even in a slightly wider historical frame this becomes a fairly meaningless.

This may be implicit in Barry’s comment (@16), but I would have thought the most obvious front-line answer is that we ALL are involved, one way or another, in relationships with the opposite gender (even if these are not sexual there are parents and siblings and children and workmates) so any change in these relationships – which feminism must entail, if it’s worthy of the name – affects US and calls into question how we conduct and envisage our lives. Not easy.

Whereas for many Americans, (open) homosexuals are not part of their everyday lives, so the issue is more detached. People can get their knickers in a twist about it if they want, and some do, but I think many Americans are happy with some variation on “Let them do their own thing,” secure in the knowledge (delusion?) that it doesn’t affect their own lives directly. If gays want to get marry, what’s the harm? But if women want to invade *my* space, join *my* club, compete for *my* job, challenge *my* authority (political, clerical, familial), it’s not something I can just ignore, or “allow” at a distance. It affects my life, for better or worse.

For the record, I consider myself a feminist (albeit not necessarily a very good one) and am – in theory – willing to abandon (some) male privilege to see women achieve their goals, but it’s a much more personal, visceral matter than that of gay rights. (Which I also approve of, but it doesn’t touch me in the same way.)

Hector, how can anyone be opposed to feminism, let alone bitterly opposed?

And I don’t mean the number of interviewees, but the basic concept: equal rights, no discrimination. If a better qualified woman applies for a job, are you bitterly opposed to her getting it?

“Hector, how can anyone be opposed to feminism, let alone bitterly opposed?

And I don’t mean the number of interviewees, but the basic concept: equal rights, no discrimination. If a better qualified woman applies for a job, are you bitterly opposed to her getting it?”

For what it is worth Mao I have long believed that Hector is an example of Poe’s Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Gay rights, to me, is an issue of ‘here’s a small minority of people who want to do there own thing and leave the rest of us to do ours, lets leave then in peace.’ feminism is more an issue of ‘let’s take whatever is good, true and beautiful in Christian civilization and natural law, burn it, and mold a new race of genderless automatons out of the ashes.’

Well, I think a number of people have nailed it: LGBTI folks want to be left alone. Women and people of color want to interact in new ways with those who reject those new ways.
And, no, I do no think the small number of people who believe they are being forced to interact with LGBTI folks is a counter point. Those people are just confusing their inner distaste with being made to genuinely interact with others. For the most part, they can ignore LGBTI people.

“Traditional” gender roles are a myth that developed around the domestic arrangements of 19th century middle-class Europeans.

ChrisT,

Not all women are feminists, believe it or not. Just like there are some ‘people of color’, like me, who believe that the dreaded white man of Europe invented civilizations that were on the whole, superior to any cultures that my race thought up.

MPA Victoria,

What is Poe’s Law.

I don’t have a problem with lesbianism. I do have a problem with 1) abortion rights, 2) the denial that men and women are innately different and want different things, and 3) the hostility towards women and men who choose to follow traditional gender rolls.

In the future, I suspect gender complementarian marriages will be shunned by the Crooked Timber in the same way that gay marriage are shunned by the Jerry Falwall crowd today.

“feminism is more an issue of ‘let’s take whatever is good, true and beautiful in Christian civilization and natural law, burn it, and mold a new race of genderless automatons out of the ashes.’”

And the bras. Don’t forget, we’re burning the bras, too.

Paper is probably more flammable anyway.

As I understand the post, the questions are what galvanizes social change and why isn’t social progress constant. I don’t have answers to them. But, why should we expect that all social movements should move at the same pace and at the same time? So, it is undeniable that the gay rights movement has made incredible strides in the U.S. in the last twenty years; but is this not comparable to the strides the feminist movement made in the fifties and sixties in the U.S., or that the civil rights movement made in roughly the same time frame?

Poe or not, some Trolls should just be silenced before they do more harm.

@43
Plarry makes a good point. Its easy to focus on “milestone” issues like the passage of keylegislation or big Supreme Court wins and use that as a guage of progress and its certainly one way of doing so, but the day to day blocking and tackling in the workplace, at the shop counter, in the admissions office that’s where these milestones are translated into permanent change.

When Roe v. Wade was affirmed one wouldn’t have expected, necessarily, that 40 years later Texas and Virginia would still be passing the kind of legislation they have been passing….the apparent “milestone progress” had to be matched with efforts to maintain the gains made.

The “DOMA victories” (and related) in the Supreme court and elsewhere belie the same need for diligence and not resting on laurels.

The VRA looked to be an obvious ‘game changer’ back in 1962, and here we are 50 years later….

Getting the law passed is sometimes the ‘easy’ part, getting society to move with that process is a much more gradual process.

P.S. Shouldn’t Daft Punk have the freedom to choose its partners without quotas – they aren’t exactly the University of Texas just because they play SXSW.

Gay rights, to me, is an issue of ‘here’s a small minority of people who want to do there own thing and leave the rest of us to do ours, lets leave then in peace.’ feminism is more an issue of ‘let’s take whatever is good, true and beautiful in Christian civilization and natural law, burn it, and mold a new race of genderless automatons out of the ashes.’

Um, no; but at the same time: yeah.

I think same sex marriage (if not “gay rights”) is winning (although only what, 8 states recognize it right now? Not quite the same as Loving v Virginia wiping out miscegenation statutes at one blow…..well, someday.) because the “why do we care about how people love each other” argument is winning (it at least won over my 86 year old father when he found out a childhood friend of mine was in a committed lesbian relationship. But in this state, they couldn’t marry; which is (was; she died of cancer) sad.)

And the issue of equality for women both socially and legally, is seen as more of an attack on “me.” An odd bit of a boundaries issue. Used to be that way with gays and lesbians; if they are, maybe I am!!!!! But we got over that, by and large. Still, if women are equal, it might mean men have to stay home and raise kids; or clean toilets; or take out trash; or cook meals. (All things I’ve been doing for 35+ years of marriage, but apparently I’m still the aberration.)

I suspect that’s where the stumbling block is. Or one of them. Along with “If we have to pay ’em the same, there’s less money to go around.” The “zero sum game” is always the economic argument; in brief, anyway.

My father doesn’t have to change much, in other words, to accept a young person he’s known all her life as a lesbian. But he would have to change a lot to accept women as completely equal in all ways to men. A LOT. It would be good change; but doing it?

Aye, there’s the rub.

Of course women are different from men. Some of the differences are essential, some irrelevant (as my wife would put it, “style details”). The question is, to what degree if any should these differences be reflected in rights? All it should take to be a feminist is to answer that question “None”.

Rights? Or just the way they are regarded in society?

How many hierarchies can we remove?

Rmj: As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

Rmj: As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

Well, yeah, law is important. But King’s “dream” wasn’t for a set of statutes.

I have no problem with laws the eliminate “difference,” although just as no law can eliminate racism, neither can it mandate sexual equality. Would that it were that easy. I was assuming that feminism, like the struggle for civil rights of which it is a component, was also about changing hearts and minds and so the culture.

Because we need a Voting Rights Act; but we also need a culture where the legal opinion of Justice Roberts on section 5 of the Act is so specious it would no more be written down than Justice Holmes now infamous “Three generations of imbeciles are enough!”

I don’t think that kind of eugenics is going to make a comeback soon; but sadly, it took the Nazis to kill it. Still, we need to work on making some kinds of social standards unthinkable, and that’s a reach far beyond “rights.”

’twas my only point.

“Feminism as the view that men and women exhibit no differences imposed coercively by Patriarchy ”

Ugh, that should be no differences NOT imposed coercively.

[H]ow can anyone be opposed to feminism… the basic concept: equal rights, no discrimination.

TLDR: Because for the most part, because that’s not what they see as feminism.

Most movements have claims at different levels. These exist on a spectrum, but we might simplify and refer to the platitude, the claim currently being fought over, and the extreme claim. So for feminism, these might look something like:

Platitude: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” (Rebecca West).
Controversy: “Women should get more maternity leave.” (Current feminist battle)
Extremist: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” (Andrea Dworkin).

Now you’ll notice that the three positions are all logically distinct. Nevertheless, activists make use of them to wrap up the claim under controversy and try to make the association more or less palatable: “Unless you’re one of those man-hating feminazis, you’re not a feminist, so you should oppose increasing maternity leave.” “Unless you’re one of those bigoted misogynists, you’re a feminist, so you should favour increasing maternity leave.”

You’ll notice that even non-feminists don’t disagree with the platitude, and the extreme view – while not quite a straw-man, would be rejected by most feminists. But there is nevertheless some truth in the idea that there is a grand battle, because a lot of the pushing is done by ideologically driven people with much more extreme views than the average punter. If feminist activists get their way on maternity leave, they won’t just stop, they’ll move onto the next battle. Ditto anti-feminists.

You’ll notice that your capsule view of feminism – “equal rights and no discrimination” – is at this stage just a platitude. Indeed, how could anyone be against that! Someone else’s capsule view of feminism might be “Special rights for women over men, plus a neo-Victorian sexual prudishness.” And how could anyone be for that!

Note: this is a general phenomenon. We could do the same with environmentalism, socialism, libertarianism, or the Democratic Party, or whatever. Ideally these movements become victims of their own success, as the claim under controversy becomes sufficiently close to the extreme claim that they lose their own supporters. That is the optimistic interpretation as to why feminism has stalled (I am not generally an optimist).

I’m not sure I would say that gay people “want to be left alone” so much as that the fight for gay rights, at least over the past few decades in the US, has been defined by the LGBT community wanting participation rights in existing and deeply entrenched institutions. Whereas I think a lot (tho not all) of the flash points for contemporary feminism revolve around demands that if they were met would fundamentally alter existing and deeply entrenched institutions and associated norms. (This much Hector does get right.)

Here, I think this Amanda Marcotte piece about how “radical” contemporary feminism is, historically speaking, is totally on point. (Obviously, I think this is a huge selling point for contemporary feminism.)

p.s. Recent decades have also seen women rise to leadership positions in major countries, from Thatcher to Merkel (their politics aside; we’re talking about gender barriers). The number of countries in which a woman pres. or PM is inconceivable is quite small.

One could make the argument that the stud/slut double standard is the outgrowth of biological differences in how men and women view sex and what they find desirable in a partner, and not a completely arbitrary societal construct. I’m not sure I would go down that path, but I’ve seen others do so.

My view isn’t that the slut/stud double standard cannot be explained, quite to the contrary. Understanding the phenomenon and its origin should help us reject it. I’m saying that the double standard is *morally* arbitrary, not that it’s an arbitrary and unpredictable accident that sexual norms would evolve in a society that shame women over sex more than men.

To jog the intuition, I also understand how a special disgust response adheres to anal sex that doesn’t to vaginal sex. (I’ve seen earnest gay rights supporters argue piously that this difference is purely artifact of patriarchy and culture as well. The only people that convinces are those who don’t need convincing and are already on your side.) Fine, but that saying nothing much about whether sodomy should be illegal or stigmatized.

Let me tell you why gay rights has been so successful and feminism (as you define it) has not: one is looking for equality of rights, the other for equality of outcomes. The former is easy to identify with, easy to support. The latter is thoroughly evil.

And just look at the people your brand of feminism likes to associate itself with: Irigaray, a thoroughly anti-science far-left looney. McKinnon, et. al., women who fear sex so much they have become 21st century puritans. The list, of course, goes on.

You ask “Do we really have to keep re-writing every word of this stuff for each successive generation?”

Maybe you shouldn’t re-write it. Maybe it’s time for a different approach. Maybe “we hate science, rationality, prosperity, and sex” isn’t the optimal message to advance women’s rights.

Also I think Salem @59 and Anderson @64 are right about the spectrum of meanings of ‘feminism’.

@70

The school which complains about the gender ratio of interviewees on radio shows.

So keep digging, girls. I’ve got your back.

Thank you and a gentle reminder that, in Latin America, the struggle against the oppression of women is very strongly linked to struggle against neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and capitalism.

Just to urge that people read Bloix@19 for a sense of the pre-AIDS world of gay activism. (The sources of the word “gay” are to be found in this earlier world.) One place to go for a sense of that world in NYC at least — runs as a leit-motif through Jeremiah Moss’s posts, not a theme:
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/

I also agree with those here who have noted the huge progress made in western democracies (thought elsewhere, too) re feminism. Easy to underestimate the progress if you didn’t live through an earlier era, or are too young now to have heard first-hand tales of women’s lives, say, 110 years ago from, e.g., middle class women in the eastern U.S. For instance, my grandmothers were young women in their 20’s with children before they got to vote. Impressive progressive when you consider how much more deeply and thoroughly and utterly issues raised by feminism challenge our eons-old social, political and economic arrangements than just about anything else does.

Not to limit the discussion to liberal traditions of rights. Thanks to JanieM @2 for the link — maybe transgender struggles will open all of us to taking the next steps….

MPA Victoria,

Your so-called ‘freedom to control your body’ or whatever the buzzword is in the Santa Monica salons right now, is trivial compared to the life of the embryo. at least, in the minds of morally civilised people. if you choose to adopt the morality of a New Guinea cannibal tribe instead, according to which human people are dispemdable, I can’t particularly help you.

To Hector, Hilary Clinton, breeder that she is, showed up to the table. As did Sarah Palin. Oh, and so did Sheryl Sandberg, and millions of others like her. Nice of you to ignore contributions of working mothers. But blindness such as yours requires firmly closed eyes.

And are those gender rolls the kind served with dinner or are they really just delicious cronuts or better yet, flakey biscuits? Just curious…

I somehow missed Bloix’s 19 the first time around. That is a phenomenal comment; I needn’t have bothered with my 61 at all.

Maria,

Ok, if you say so.

To my mind there’s an elephant in the room which has been implicit in some comments, but not really laid out properly.

If we take two examples, the USA and Ireland, then one major, important difference is that probably 80% of gay people will make gay rights an important part of their political (voting/activism) calculus. For women, the numbers around feminism are lower – and worse where the 20% of gay people who aren’t impressed with gay rights aren’t in the main active against them, there’s a good 30% (at least) of women who consistently vote for anti-feminist politicians.

@85

But this is the solution to the gay rights movement’s success, yes? (Also, @61). The current gay rights movement is solely concerned with mimicking and so to speak ‘infiltrating’ the straight world. Joining the army, getting married, getting a job at (and then being laid off from) some multinational corporation….these are the current aims of the modern gay rights movement, as far as I can see. Clearly there is no threat to existing power structures here. What has been completely lost is the radical gay rights movement’s critique of contemporary society, which genuinely questioned institutions like the army, marriage, corporate life, heteronormativity etc. Gay rights have been accepted insofar as the gay rights movement has ditched the radicals. At the end of the day, gays have to adapt to the straight world, not the other way round.

And the same with feminism, although it hasn’t been so successful. Women are allowed to become successful insofar as they behave “like men” (Hilary Clinton, Golda Meir, Thatcher). In other words, they are allowed to achieve power as long as they don’t self-identify as feminists (or if they do, they espouse feminism in such an empty depoliticised way that the word becomes essentially meaningless). The idea that women might gain power in order to seriously challenge patriarchy is simply off the table in modern political discussion. It hasn’t worked so well because it turns out that misogyny is much more deeply rooted in Western culture than we thought, but the basic, ahem, thrust of modern feminism is clear.

And this has occurred at the same time as a genuinely radical critique of capitalism also became essentially unutterable. One wonders if this is a coincidence.

Hidari: I don’t want to come off as insulting here, either in presuming way too much or way too little knowledge on your part. Pardon me if I do either. Do you know about the ongoing debate among GLBT activists about ENDA-style statutes?

Oh, hey, it occurs to me that whether or not you know about it, others won’t. Hidari, you can skip the rest of this if it’s old hat.

ENDA stands for “Employment Non-Discrimination Act”. It’s legislation that GLBT Congresspeople introduce every few years, that so far hasn’t gone anywhere. A serious hot issue in the GLBT scene is how encompassing it should be. The Human Rights Campaign, which is by far the most media-prominent G-kinda-L-occasionally-B-no-room-for-T advocacy group, pushes a narrowly construed approach, focusing exclusively or primarily on discrimination on the basis of orientation. On at least one occasion it’s gotten boosters to hold up and dispose of bills that would have ranged more widely – a lot of T and B people regard HRC as the worst kind of ally-talking, enemy-acting neighbor with damn good reason. Other groups would like to see much wider coverage of issues around gender identity and gender expression – basically, not only should you be safe from being fired for not being straight, but also for being more butch or otter than your boss likes, going through trans* transitioning, and the like.

HRC and its supporters are, basically, a very bourgeois group, and very much uninterested in any particular issues facing LGBT people of color, to boot. This probably isn’t 100% unconnected with the relative ease its representatives have getting air time and column space, when compared to groups that do take up these concerns.

In short, the GLBT rights scene is deeply divided right now, and one side of it has a disproportionately hard time being seen or heard by the surrounding population.

People seem to think you can draw a clear distinction between “radical” and, umm, “moderate”(?) feminism, but this isn’t nearly as easy as it seems. Say you want fair equality of opportunity (in the Rawlsian sense). Totally liberal, non-radical demand. Okay, but pretty immediately you’re going to have to start talking about sharing housework and esp. child-care. At the very least. Because you can’t have the one without the other. And so immediately, you’re knee deep in “cultural” issues. (And I take it that it’s no accident at all that issues around house work have become more prominent as equality of opportunity has in good measure increased—not to say we have anything like fair opportunity of equality now.) Which is simply another way of saying why the resistance is so strong, and why the gains are so hard-fought.

Maybe people think radical feminism = Dworkin, but that seems to be pretty done and dusted—if you look at Marcotte or Feministing, etc., it’s just not there. (And I may well be wrong about this, but my sense is that setting aside the press the anti-porn campaign got, she was always a bit of an outlier.)

1. I haven’t had time yet to read the whole thread, but it’s much better than I expected when I left the house midday.

2. I have led a deeply unconventional life in some ways and a quiet, mainstream one in others. I grew up in a small midwestern town in a deeply traditional Italian-Catholic world (I was in high school before I knew there were Irish Catholics too….except that my mother was a Baptist, so….well, never mind all that now). I quite literally didn’t know that gay people existed until I was discovering I was one, when I was in college. For that matter, never mind homosexuality, I barely knew sex existed, and in the end it became the trigger for and framework of my rebellion against the world I was raised in.

So from my vantage point, whatever you can say about radical goals vs. conservative / mainstreaming / middle class / conventional ones, the ongoing dismantling of the closet is a step in the right direction.

3. Despite the current dismantling, I don’t think we can at all take the gains we’ve made for granted, although at this point it would probably take a wider (than just gay issues) upheaval to unravel them.

equal pay for equal work doesn’t threaten the fundamentalist or ‘traditional’ family where the wife doesn’t want to work outside the home.

In my experience it can be perceived as very threatening indeed — for example, when an employer is faced with the decision of how much to offer a new male hire, and current female staff object to the idea of offering him more for the same job “because he has a family to support.”

Having gone back and read what I wrote, I can see that although I think I’m correct in viewing AIDS as a turning point from “liberation” to “rights,” I’ve managed to ignore the very important work of ACT UP in publicizing the need for action on AIDS and in changing the way that AIDS research was conducted. ACT UP was not conservative in its goals or its methods. But it was narrowly targeted at a specific issue and was not an effort to change society in significant ways.

Hidari 89 “Women are allowed to become successful insofar as they behave “like men” (Hilary Clinton, Golda Meir, Thatcher).”

I consider you one of the best commenters here, but come on, what the hell is this all about? Do they scratch their balls or something? And is Barak Obama acting too white?

How can you lament unequal outcomes and endorse gender stereotypes at the same time? Or have I misunderstood?

Things have changed. I’m old enough (just) to remember the 1960s, and back then you’d barely ever see a woman politician or business leader or unionist on the news; if one ever got through she’d inevitably get the “as a woman” question, either in banter or because the interviewer was genuinely curious (“how does the balance of payments crisis affect women?”). In the same period – not at all coincidentally – you’d never see a woman driving a bus or a lorry or a mail van, and women in offices were generally there to take dictation [sic] from men. That we can even talk about equality of opportunity as unfinished business shows how far we’ve come in half a century.

In other ways, the OP is right and things are still pretty bloody awful – perhaps more overtly and aggressively awful than they were for women of my mother’s generation (you don’t want to know how long ago that was). I remember seeing the big ad campaign for Wonderbra in the 90s and thinking what happened? where did all those gains go? Lynne Segal argued that what was happening was pushback – trying to put newly-independent women back in their box by attacking them on terrain where they’re still vulnerable. I think that’s just what we’re seeing now. Part of me thinks the vicious misogyny of the anti-feminist tweeters (and Youtube commenters, and others) has a ragged, desperate quality to it, which ultimately bodes well for the future: they’re going for the really nasty stuff now because there’s no one behind them and that’s all they’ve got. But part of me always was a sunny optimist.

To me it seems that for as long as gay identities have existed, gay people have been OK as long as they expressed these identities with due discretion in private contexts, and not otherwise. This is still the case now, albeit the values for ‘due discretion’ and ‘private contexts’ have both changed.

So in addition to Bloix’s point @19 (which I certainly couldn’t improve on) there’s also been an interesting change in the role of marriage itself within our culture (at least in the UK, with which I’m familiar). Nowadays we tend to think of the decision to be married or unmarried as a private one.

The OP is arguing that the gay rights movement has been successful (largely so far and will be totally soon enough) over gay marriage.

The comparison is then to women’s rights. But part of the explanation could be that of course marriage rights were already available to women. Err, obviously.

The fight for women’s rights has been more about economic and political rights. Which we might assume are rather harder to gouge out of the pre-existing system. And I wouldn’t say that that fight has been unsuccessful either. It’s only Appenzell InnerRhoden which has even attempted to make the right to vote gender unequal again (and to make the point about gay rights, no one has been suggesting that sexuality has any influence at all on the right to vote. Gender, yes historically, but sexuality no).

On the economic rights, in my lifetime a woman has gone from being the simple economic appendage of her nearest male relative (husband, father, brother, whatever) to being an entirely distinct economic unit. Back in the early 60s a woman could not even have a bank account (in the UK that is) without the signature of some man or other. All of that has gone: by the late 80s we moved to entirely individual taxation. No longer is, economically and in the law, a woman treated as some part of a unit, she’s entirely an individual with exactly the same rights and responsibilities (for her own debts for example, something that wasn’t true those decades ago, husbands could be held liable for a wife’s debts) as any other adult individual.

Maybe things still need to go further, but to say that things haven’t changed, or that the same fights are being fought again, strikes me as being untrue.

@33 ““Traditional” gender roles are a myth that developed around the domestic arrangements of 19th century middle-class Europeans.”

Seriously? The millennia of recorded human history we have where women do the majority of the domestic and child rearing work is all an invention of the 19th century?

First sentence should have been ‘No I’m not’.

“women tend to attain power in the ‘West’ only insofar as they distance themselves from it as a political movement.”

In fact, it’s the opposite, IMO. Hardly any politician can attain power in the ‘West’ without embracing feminism. Feminism is the default position, except for some nibbling around the edges (women soldiers in combat sort of things). Equal rights is feminism, and “promote other women to positions of power” is something else.

I would argue that it is a strange sort of feminist that would argue “I am a feminist. But I hate Jewish women. And black women. And Asian women. And poor women. And lesbians. And in fact any women who is not identical to me in every way”.

How about “I am a feminist, and I oppose all discrimination, whether it be against women, ethnic minorities, LGBT people or disabled people. And I’m crossing this picket line because I believe in management’s right to manage – that equality and diversity policy isn’t going to implement itself!”

Not that it’s up to me, but I preferred “women’s liberation” to “feminism”. Women’s liberation was always about power.

I admit to wondering what history is like in the timeline Mao Cheng Ji is from.

I was just trying to peel off the rhetoric (“Women are allowed to become successful insofar as they behave “like men””), and bring some clarity. But I don’t think I can succeed, so I’ll shut up.

Tim Worstall:

“The OP is arguing that the gay rights movement has been successful (largely so far and will be totally soon enough) over gay marriage.

The comparison is then to women’s rights. But part of the explanation could be that of course marriage rights were already available to women. Err, obviously.”

Even for you, this is bad.

Am I the only one who senses in this piece a degree of bitterness towards gays and the gay rights movement?

First off, I don’t particularly agree with the comparison of feminism to the gay rights movement. As Barry has put forth, it is a comparison women’s rights to the gay movement. If we were to evaluate the progress of women’s rights versus gay rights in the last 50 years, I think we would all have to agree that the women’s rights movement has been the more successful. It is only recently that gay rights are being recognized in legislation. Still in many countries it is illegal to be openly homosexual and carries a penalty of incarceration or even death. It is not, to my knowledge, illegal to be a woman…anywhere.

As a gay man, I don’t necessarily feel like feminists are my “natural allies”. Feminism is, to me, a very broad term and I could not possibly say I identify with all or even most of the ideals and beliefs it encompasses. As a gay man and more generally as a person who has had to deal with the difficulties of discrimination and hate because of the way I was born, I would consider all opressed people to be my allies in the fight for human rights.

@114 That was precisely my point. The situation is not that much better in the UK although, because we are British, the sexism lacks the aggressive malice that is the speciality of the American Republican party.

The election of Thatcher, as many predicted at the time, didn’t really change anything in terms of the highly sexist framework of British politics.

“Not that it’s up to me, but I preferred “women’s liberation” to “feminism”. Women’s liberation was always about power.”

But this is what has been lost when the social uprisings of the ’60s and ’70s moved from a ‘liberatory/emancipatory’ framework to an ‘equal rights’ framework. Remember that the first major pro-gay movement to come out of the ’60s was the Gay Liberation Front. Womens’ lib, as you pointed out was about Womens’ Liberation , not ‘equal rights’. And the various socialist/communist movements (which, in the Western colonies were often termed movements of national liberation) have also ‘toned down’ their rhetoric, when they haven’t ditched it entirely. Some things have been gained by this approach. But things have been lost, too.

Hidari@120

And the various socialist/communist movements (which, in the Western colonies were often termed movements of national liberation) have also ‘toned down’ their rhetoric, when they haven’t ditched it entirely.

To the contrary, they are louder and more successful than ever.

The longer I observe contemporary society, the less impressed I am with the radical element and the more impressed I am with the goals of the traditionalists, even if I find their rhetoric and strategies misguided. If one were to create a hierarchy of human needs and assign resources to these goals, feminism and non traditional sexual rights would fall quite low on the list. Besides the immediacy of energy, wealth, and environmental issues there is ultimately the question of whether a culture that refuses to reproduce via traditional male female unions will be able to extend its values into a new generation of immigrants born outside the culture. I am skeptical. So I must conclude that until pro NTsexrights and pro feminist rhetoric and policies are proven to produce a culture with robust heterosexual fertility – it quite literally has no future, since the people that can understand and support it simply will not be brought into existence.

maybe the reason you still see a glass ceiling above your head is because you’re living in a glass house

#107: and to make the point about gay rights, no one has been suggesting that sexuality has any influence at all on the right to vote

Strictly speaking, this is not true. In some places and times homosexual sex has been a felony which, if convicted of it, could result in disenfranchisement (in other places and times it could result in *execution*, which would obviously prevent you from voting too).

Of course it wasn’t invariably prosecuted, let alone successfully, but it certainly hasn’t always been true that anyone could admit to being gay and not have their right to participate in democracy challenged or questioned. I think criminalization of homosexuality persisted later (at least in the US) than disenfranchisement of women.

On the other hand, ISTR at least one US president is believed by some to have been gay and to have had a “close friend” that people just didn’t take any public notice of what their real relationship might have been. I’m not sure how good the evidence of this is, though — it may have just been rumor, or I may be misremembering it altogether. But this may go to show that even when homosexuality is criminal on paper, individual homosexuals could still participate in democracy and politics as long as they did it from the closet.

#116: Marcotte seems to be saying pretty clearly that to qualify as a feminist one must have a particular position, not on women’s rights or patriarchy, but on the struggle of trans people. Hence, that feminism is not primarily about women’s rights.

How can you talk about women’s rights without first deciding who is a woman and who is not? (You can certainly use an unexamined definition, but you can’t use no definition at all.) ISTM much of the struggle of trans people (although I am not one) is about precisely that question: how to define and categorize people as one gender or the other, and what we ought to do with people who don’t fit neatly into one of the two most common bins.

Of course if you’re *really* not treating men and women differently, then the question of how to classify any particular individual becomes less important, but as long as we have segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, Olympic events, etc., an individual’s right to use one or the other set of facilities (for example) can be, and in some cases, has been questioned or outright denied. Not having had this experience myself, I am reluctant to underestimate its impact on the person affected.

#66: Salem, I understand what you’re saying, but “equal rights and no discrimination” is the dictionary definition of feminism.

Well, that depends a great deal on who is writing the dictionary, doesn’t it? (Which is perhaps not quite as powerful as writing the history books, but shouldn’t be completely despised either.) ISTM any responsible dictionary writer will at least make a good faith effort to include all senses in which the word is actually used by speakers of the language, and from that perspective, “feminism” does indeed cover a rather wide area. I wouldn’t call it actual polysemy, but ambiguity and misunderstanding is certainly a concern, and potentially equivocation (deliberate or otherwise).

Some people are regrettably Platonist about words having one “real” meaning and similar foolishness, but the reality of language use is messy variation. Or glorious and creative variation, depending on your point of view.

“Well, that depends a great deal on who is writing the dictionary, doesn’t it?”

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/feminism?s=t
I have no idea who wrote it. You can’t please everybody, so I assume this is the accepted meaning.

“Some people are regrettably Platonist about words having one “real” meaning and similar foolishness, but the reality of language use is messy variation.”

I don’t care about any “real” meaning. All I want is to understand what people are saying, and to be able to communicate clearly myself, that’s all. I don’t think this is unreasonable.

Jace

” It is only recently that gay rights are being recognized in legislation. Still in many countries it is illegal to be openly homosexual and carries a penalty of incarceration or even death. It is not, to my knowledge, illegal to be a woman…anywhere.”

Using the history of the USA as an analogy, it was never illegal to be black in the USA, but it had ………………… effects on the quality of one’s life.

js—“I agree that “breaking down gender ideology” is a dispiritingly vague phrase” made me laugh. You may be right about the meaning though Marcotte seems to be seeing something else there.

I agree with you about the attractiveness of a inclusive feminism—I think it’s feminism’s great strength, as I said above. Lately though I worry more about the attendant danger of diverting feminism to one of the causes it includes. It seems feminism is easily fragmented.

I think the other issue is that the gay rights movement is just making us realize a truth. That a large percentage of folks are born gay. These people hurt no one and want rights just like the hetero community. Its easy when you run with biology. Like slavery, we realized that on the whole, everyone is rather equal with their own talents and skin color, facial features, etc are meaningless. That was a reasonable argument to make. However, feminism often fights against the natural strengths of men as detrimental residue and promotes their weaknesses as the right way, and vice versa for women. You cant win rights by going against a natural order. Take abortion rights, you cant say that aborting a 9 month old in the womb is the same as a 3 day old cellular glob and expect to win. As you move more radically away from the logic that a more advanced lifeform has more advanced rights, you lose everytime. Just as the pro-life movement loses traction when they say a blob of cells has the same rights as a more developed fetus. You cant deny males are more physically aggressive, or that they approach the opposite sex in a more visual way. Just as you cant deny some women like to look pretty or behave a certain way to attract a man. This is where feminism drops the ball. Admit what nature has made us and work in that framework. That’s why womens right to vote and work is accepted. It makes sense and doesn’t fight the framework of our biology. But fighting against brazillian waxes is absurd waste of time….like fighting Disney Princess culture or not letting your son play with toy superheroes….it seems clear to everyone except the fringe.

no-one now remembers when they actually stopped thinking gay people were weird, icky and in some pre-ordained way destined to live short, unhappy lives, outside of the natural

Well. Out here in the sticks, gay people are still thought weird, icky, and outside of the natural, believe it, even when we have nothing against them personally. And there is some strange connection to feminism: it’s an always-funny for The Guys to burlesque cross-dressing and do numbers from Broadway musicals. Or cheerleaders, while some butch girls are playing some reasonably intense football.

So maybe in 20 years when such attitudes really have been forgotten, it will be found to have created a little space for flexible gender roles.

Gotta add, re mud man on the sticks and the Colbert-Kentucky story. My grandparents (both born 1890’s) lived in both NYC and what was then a rural county in NY. In said rural county they had friends or knew various people who were gay (including lesbian in that term here) and known by all to be gay, and who were integrated into different parts of the community in different but very tolerant ways (though I have no doubt that the strictures of that tolerance were often difficult for the gay people themselves to negotiate). Since living in rural New England for decades myself, where I have observed the same phenomenon (including those strictures finally have been relieved mightily), I wonder if the small town may be underestimated as a site of refuge and then change, every bit as much as a NYC or San Francisco.

Just had to say, Michael Collins @11 and Salem @15 make some great points.

I’ve thinking to do.

Kentucky is the fringe of the North, whereas I am in Orygun, which along with the rural West generally is Southron without the Black people, it seems to me. We are pretty set in our libertarian, gun-toting, live-off-the-land ways … yes, patriarchal … The comment about refuge is interesting, it’s why I am up here, for one thing. The lack of diversity (and intellectual content generally) is stifling at times, but perhaps anything that resists Modern America is a potential nucleus of change. We do Community relatively well. Hopeful.

As to feminism’s scope, I have talked to a number of WOC who just refuse to identify as feminist, ever, because they see the mainstream of feminism doing work that only matters to the upper middle class white woman, and no one else. Slamming the door shut behind you is no way to create social change. If feminists don’t care about trans women, do they need to care about gay women? If obviously the latter, why not the former? If patriarchal norms about what women should be like and what men should be like a doing the work of keeping gay/bi men, women generally, and trans people down, what’s the point of just chipping on the part that’s got your chain bolted on at the base? Better to try and tip the whole thing over, surely.

Thank you, Belle.

I am not a woman of color in the usual sense, though speaking literally I do have the coloring of the Italian side of my heritage rather than the very lily-white of the “old American” Baptist side, which mattered a lot when I was a child in the 1950s in small-town Ohio, where the strata were pretty clearly defined and “Italians” were only one step above you known who.

But for reasons you’ve encapsulated, I’ve always refused to call myself a feminist, even though my beliefs, and my hopes for the world, are certainly “feminist” in any ordinary sense. But what I’ve found is that some of my friends who are very vocal as feminists have always treated me with an attitude that can be encapsulated as, “if you don’t see the world the way I do, you can’t possibly have thought it through correctly.” Gloria Steinem (not among my friends but much admired by some of them) said, “If you’re not a feminist you’re a masochist,” which alone is enough to make me refuse to call myself by that label. I’ve actually lost friendships over this set of issues as the years have accumulated. (Well, over this and other, complicating factors.)

And I have to confess — I have avoided continuing to comment on this thread because I didn’t know how to say this in the context of what people I like and respect a lot — Lynne and Meredith for starters — were writing.

I don’t know where a line should be drawn at excluding people from the causes “feminists” espouse, and I know it isn’t a small problem to figure out where to put your energy in terms of trying to make the world, or even your own little neighborhood, a better place. That’s a huge topic. My own energy goes to land conservation, organic food, and the care of children as major “causes,” with the occasional foray into gay rights or gay marriage campaigns; I totally leave the directly “feminist” efforts to other people, and a lot of the time now, because of climate change, I wonder whether working on anything else but that is like standing around while the house burns down around us. I don’t now the answer to that one either.

In relation to something that a bunch of comments have mentioned or implied — I think a lot about the problem of e.g. gay people gaining the right to marry by virtue of presenting our middle class/mainstream/harmless face to the world, and hoping that the more extremely non-conforming people will just please keep a low profile while we go about it. I hate that, but I don’t know what to do about it. I’m only one person, and as far as changing the world goes I couldn’t even figure out how to get my kids to stop squabbling when they were little, so….I haven’t got much of a clue.

Back to feminism before I lose the thread, and before I get back to work: I am not a trans person, but neither do I fit into a “female” bin which is part of a system that allows of only two bins. I think we need more bins. I think that a feminism that wants to turn its back on or exclude trans people is in effect excluding me as well, and hopefully that goes a long way to explaining why I don’t label myself as a feminist.

As far as that goes, I don’t label myself using nouns, other than maybe “I’m a human being” and “I’m an American” (both incontrovertible). Otherwise I prefer adjectives: gay instead of lesbian, for instance. Another can of worms.

what’s the point of just chipping on the part that’s got your chain bolted on at the base? Better to try and tip the whole thing over, surely.

I think it’s really important to chip away at your own chain, not necessarily taking any account of how anyone else defines the ‘whole thing’. “If you’re a feminist, why don’t you support my struggle?” is a legitimate question, but it ought to be a real question. “If you don’t support my struggle you’re no true feminist” isn’t particularly helpful; “if you don’t support her struggle (like I do), you’re no true feminist” seems positively disruptive.

I don’t know if it’s okay to ask this…. The gender roles are not so simple and straight-forward.

It’s fine to ask. It’s hard to answer. Certainly XX-chromosome-wise I’m female, but it’s the social/cultural idea of gender that I question. I do have a whole big theory/metaphor about it, but I doubt I can fit it in a blog comment, so maybe I can get at it sideways by recalling someone who once, when I was going on about this subject, told me that of course there was a whole “spectrum” from male to female, so what was I complaining about? I was just somewhere along the spectrum instead of at one of the ends.

But that’s exactly how I don’t think it is. That suggests that there’s blue at one end and red and the other and purple in the middle, and we’re all distributed somehow along an axis where “essence of male” and “essence of female” qualities and characteristics are combined in different ratios.

My response (which of course I didn’t think of at the time) is: what about green and yellow and orange?

That doesn’t really come capture it either, but like I said, it’s a blog comment.

*****

Also, you don’t need to apologize for how you commented. I like your comments, including the ones in this thread. It’s just hard to find an entry point sometimes that doesn’t require chapters and novellas worth of explaining, and there’s also the concern — that now seems to be part of the meta-conversation here, and I’m glad of it — about what kind of a reaction certain comments are likely to trigger from the usual suspects.

It’s interesting to read about others’ experiences of feminism, especially in this context Meredith’s, which describe the same time I was at university from the other side of the classroom wall. Some groups did seem to throw up gates: you had to take a certain view on separatism (of course everyone was doing separatism then), or later toward men, or toward one’s mother and her values. My own youthful experience makes me insist on calling myself a feminist no matter how narrow some seem to wish to define the term. I imagine things are very different now, anyway.

This entire thread has been fascinating. But I find interesting is the piece of context it has not touched upon and which I actually thought was going to be the subject when I clicked over from my RSS: the very recent dust-up over race and feminism and the Twitter reaction of #solidarityforwhitewomen.

http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201308122356-0022973

The issue of race has been touched upon in a few comments without getting into this context and I’m not sure bringing this up adds much to the broader conversation, but couldn’t resist intruding for a moment to add it into the mix.

@158: “Western feminist circles” in the 70s wanted women to be recognized officially (and recompensed officially) for such work.

All such workers at home everywhere have a right to take pride in the work they do. It is also the case that for many women employed as household labor, the ability to stay home and clean your own house and take care of your own kids instead of other people’s has often meant a step up economically and socially, not a step down. That does not obviate the fact that through millenia women have repeatedly been assured of the pride and dignity involved in doing the heavy cleaning and not getting paid for it, and it hasn’t always worked out so well.

“women [who] view the work they do at home as their womanly responsibility, duty, and pride” may be imposing limitations on their daughters’ lives. Certainly, to take pride in such inherently valuable work as that of the household is no evil. But this phrase “womanly responsibility” — I find it ominous.

@141: There is some inherent humor involved in hearty men trying to be delicate and “feminine”; a heavy thing trying to convey lightness is in most cases going to be funnier than the reverse. Tomboyism on the other hand has always been acceptable, at least as a phase; everyone understands, consciously or unconsciously, why girls might envy and try to imitate the greater freedom of behavior and expression permitted to boys. A boy who plays with dolls and behaves “girlishly” is voluntarily assuming the emblems of the inferior sex; everyone understands in the same way that this is somehow “not right”.

As the thread fades away I’d like to belatedly thank Maria for the OP—I have often wondered the same thing.

Phil, I enjoyed your comments—I can picture the coat you wanted and love the thought of femininity as a drag act. I like to think of make-up and nail polish and high heels and leg-shaving as play, or dress-up, and when they are there’s no harm in them; they are optional. The problem is they aren’t always optional, but that’s a whole big topic on its own.

Janie, hope there will be another conversation here soon that can be described as “The Pursuit of Truth in the Company of Friends.”

135:Using the history of the USA as an analogy, it was never illegal to be black in the USA

Actually…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

Oh. And on another point.

I believe the *reason* the gay rights movement went so far, and apparently so fast, is the feminist movement.

Basically, as soon as you stop believing in gender essentialism, the arguments against gay people vanish. (“Why not a boy rather than a girl? Why does it *matter*?”)

And despite the ingrained gender essentialism in the culture, *huge* inroads against gender essentialism were made during the 1970s. I feel that we are reaping some of the benefits.

Whenever I get depressed about the rate of progress (and I do), I remember that job ads were sex-segregated in the US until *1972*. (Not sure about European countries.)

I lived in Milwaukee in the early 1980s, and a very popular local produce market would put ads in their window: “Woman wanted.” I complained to them and they basically thumbed their nose at me. I sent a letter to some gov’t agency or other, and nothing happened. Then I moved back east and forgot about it til now.

As a gay man, I agree the struggles for women’s rights and LGBT rights do make us natural allies. However, I assert that just as many gay men would be threatened with rape if Sir Elton John was proposed for a banknote. And a reassessment of the Second Wave rhetoric about infantilization is required. If you are a man with an unshaven back you get the same negative reactions as a woman with hairs peaking from her bikini. The standard of beauty obsessed with youth is not solely a feminist issue.

With programmes on the tele finally featuring “normal” gay roles, and the Supreme Court decision ever present in the news, we are simply the headliners. And despite the representations of “Modern Family”, I live in Arizona – where I can still lose my job, be refused a job, and lose my kids in a custody battle for being gay with no legal recourse. Granted these things are less likely than 20 years ago, but still not protected. Our movements are contemporaneous, but women stopped being portrayed as TV housewives and received rights enforced in law decades ago. We are still catching up…