Girl Talk

I’ve dubbed 2008 the year of disenfranchised firsts, and women are clearly the leaders of the underdog pack.

That Hillary Clinton managed to convince America that 51% of the population is all of a sudden a “minority” constitutes the biggest feat of her candidacy. And following in her Ferragamo footsteps, Sarah Palin is now carrying the torch toward tangible accomplishment that may or may not equate to the root

It’s a serious, if not altogether Sex In The City question: In a culture consumed with feminist theory, where do honest-to-God women fit in?

If women fit in the feminist picture at all, it’s a very tight squeeze – in that regard not unlike Palin herself, at least according to unsolicited and unfortunately frequent references our founding editor makes to his fantasy life.

Anyway, it turns out that feminism has rooted a lot of women out of the way, particularly the successful ones.

And it had to – feminism has no tolerance for its critics, especially those who manage to achieve outside of its narrowly-defined borders.

After all, how else would it survive?

Feminism exists on wallowing women, not winning women. When a movement recruits its members by appealing to self-pity and oppression, the constituency will naturally be a maudlin mass of downtrodden dames – whether or not they’re actually downtrodden.

Conditioned as we are about female politicians, it’s by now a foregone conclusion that Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher – two revered female politicians – were ardent feminists.

Not exactly. In fact, not at all.

Both women towed the anti-feminist line throughout their hallowed careers, Meir painting feminists as “a bunch of bra-burning nuts,” and Thatcher dismissing the movement by saying, “I owe nothing to women’s lib.”

Of course, that didn’t stop Clinton’s campaign from piggybacking on Thatcher’s reputation – a legacy she achieved no thanks to Hillary’s pet movement, which involved her portraying herself as “more Thatcher than anyone else.”

It appears the campaign’s attempt at Pavlovian conditioning worked, well, at least up to the point that Clinton’s name is now so closely associated with Thatcher’s that it seems like Margaret hand-picked Hillary to be her successor.

If millennial feminism can so deftly pigeonhole giants like Meir and Thatcher, imagine how narrowly it has cast us regular gals. Which is a not-so-subtle segue into one of my favorite topics: Me!

At first glance, I’m in a lot of ways an exemplar of the feminist prototype, embodying at least superficially those quintessential feminist values. I kept my last name, I generally shun bras (stop it, Mr. Folks), and I’m waiting to have kids.

But my husband whose name I didn’t take gets three meals a day from me, those loose breasts are courtesy of a certain Dr. O, and I’m only postponing children so I can stay home when I have them.

None of these six qualities is part of some bigger narrative about my autonomy.

Going bra-less or keeping my name or postponing kids is no more a political statement than buying boobs or spoiling my husband or staying home. Those are just my preferences, irony and all – and it only seems ironic when viewed through the feminist prism. For there to be irony there has to be mismatched pursuits, and there are none. Simply, these are the quirks of this particular woman … and in this I’m not alone.

Like Thatcher and Meir, there are women aplenty who don’t subscribe to pathetic feminist principles. Women who refuse to impute political significance to every last decision. Women who do things a certain way just because, and women who admit that there’s no other reason. And it’s these women who live their choices while Palin and Clinton only parade theirs.