The Feminist Review

This past week, author/speaker/researcher Lyn Mikel Brown came to town to speak about the themes in her book, Packaging Girlhood. In the book, Brown asserts that girlhood is being commercialized and shaped in ways that are unhealthy and damaging to our children, primarily through false notions of empowerment, profit-driven manipulation of the transition from childhood to adolescence, and increased sexualization and fetishization of girls.

This post is not about the content of Brown’s talk, though it was quite good. Instead, it’s about at least one reaction to the announcement of the event, and what it might tell us about how much work is yet to be done in finding equity and justice for women in our culture.

On the discussion forum of the local newspaper, the first post in response to the event announcement said:

“Oh goodie, another liberal brainwash opportunity…”

Despite the reputation of online discussion forums (and this one in particular) to facilitate antagonism, I was still surprised that someone would politicize a lecture about helping girls to grow up healthy. I couldn’t let it stand, and so I posted a reply asking the poster to clarify what evidence they had that Dr. Brown was misleading her audiences or that the presentation would be a brainwashing. The reply was, in part:

“Well, being and [sic] intelligent, college-educated modern gal, I was able amazingly to discern from reading the discription [sic] of Brown’s views (she wants girls not be limited by the stereotypes of society) and by the fact that she is speaking at Earlham, one of the most liberal campuses in the US, that it is highly likely that her views will be in line with typical liberal hogwash.

Being a conservative, I don’t feel that girls are limited in our society in any way whatsoever. They have the same opportunities as their brothers which may explain why most medical schools now have at least 50% female graduates! Yes, at one time girls were limited in their opportunities, but of course liberals do not want to acknowledge that tremendous progress has been made and that girls are now treated with equality. After all, if liberals acknowledge this, what will they have to gripe about and write their brainwashing books about?”

From there we exchanged observations on the impact that the event venue might or might not have on perceptions of the event, but the poster never presented any specific information about why the talk was to be avoided.

For me, it was a wake-up call and reminder that there are at least some people “out there” who believe feminism has achieved its goals, and that there is no significant work to be done in the area of raising awareness about inequality, misogyny, and other issues related to how women are treated in this culture. It was particularly striking to me that this particular claim came from a women, who described herself as college educated, intelligent, and “modern” (though I had no way to verify or measure those things); it’s not that I would expect women without college degrees to be more accepting of such a claim, but my experience has been that someone who’s had the privilege to go to college has perhaps also had the privilege of spending time and energy looking more deeply than others at the way the world works.

If even just some women believe, after having thought it through to their satisfaction, that girls and women do not have limits placed on them because of their gender, it speaks to the pervasive nature of the dangerous stories we tell ourselves about this culture and how successful we must be, and how much work is left to do to create something new and better.

Filed under: books, events on April 12th, 2008 by Chris Hardie