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WAVICALISM

When you recognize that there's really no one                December 23, 2014
accepted set of standard feminist ideas-- and                February 19, 2015
there's certainly no standards body defining the             February 23, 2019
one true feminist doctrine-- if you want to talk
about the scene at all, it would be useful to
have some sort of accepted terminology, a
taxonomy of common strains of thought with
standard labels--

For some time, I was trying to use the
"wave" idea, where the first wave would
be the fight for the basics in the 1800s--
the right to vote and so on.
                                               But even that can be
Then the "Second Wave" was the label           problematic: The Simone de
I associated with the 70s feminism that        Beauvoir book "The Second Sex"
I was encountering as a young teenager--       is often taken as the founding
many of the fights in those days were          of the "Second Wave", but de
also pretty basic--  you could still start     Beauvoir, being French is not
a debate by saying something like:             so inclined toward the
                                               puritanical attitudes I
    "Women are just as good as men             associate with the Second Wave.
    are at ____", where you fill in
    the blank with the name of some
    white collar profession.

But there were also many odd ideas
the 70s feminists were exploring,
and many of those have been abandoned--
which is fine, usually-- and forgotten,
which I think is not-so-fine.
                                              Talking about the problematic
Some of the excesses of the 70s were          aspects of these "excesses"--
looking to me like they were making           and just establishing that they
a come-back, and some better knowledge of     existed-- make up much of the
history might've slowed them down a bit.      verbiage here.

                                                 ALL_ABOUT_ME_AND_FEMINISM

Some time circa 1980, there                   Perhaps unfortunately, I don't
was an internal split in the                  say much about the converse--
ranks, an impatience with an                  the women's movement in it's
undercurrent of puritanism                    various guises have no doubt
in much feminist thinking--                   produced a more enlightened
                                              world in many respects, and
This was the rise of what's                   were I a more positive guy I
often called the "pro-sex"                    would spend more time on
feminists, which *used to be*                 congratulations.
often called the "third wave".
                                                (Actually that's another
                                                project I should add to the
In recent decades there's also                  list-- the brigade of male
been an interest in ideas                       whiners may not understand
associated with "intersectionality",            that there are ways in which
and I think there's a tendency to               their lives would suck more
call *that* the "third wave"--                  were it not for feminism.)

So sometimes when people say "third
wave" they might mean "pro-sex",
but other times they might mean
"not-so-white".


And me, I'm adrift on the waves,
still groping for ways to talk about
this stuff with out undue confusion.




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