The XX Factor: What women really think.

RE: The Waah Waah Sisterhood

Rachael I don’t think you’re going to find anyone on this blog racing to second Karen Von Hahn’s simplistic take on feminism, any more than we swallowed the NOW tantrum last night or the Steinem logic earlier this month. The split you’re sketching isn’t really between feminists and traditionalists but between feminists and what Von Hanh seems to want to characterize as overgrown tweens. I think that she's mixed up her criticism of apathetic women with a critique of a new generation of (for lack of a better word) post-feminists. Like you, I am infuriated by representatives of the women’s movement who demand I vote for whichever candidate wears the Spanx. And like you—and Rich Ford, whose wonderful book we just excerpted—I agree that if all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail (in this case pervasive sexism). And that this is a lazy way to view the world. Right or wrong, this generation of feminists can’t be made to see everything through a gender prism, and that’s not because we’re all spoiled, stupid, or too wrapped up with the Spice Girls to see what’s really happening under our noses—or just above the glass ceilings.

Let’s agree that life is too complicated to hammer away at problems—or at Kennedys—for imagined acts of sexism. But can we also agree that Von Hahn, for all that her evidence is dopey, points to the same trend Deborah Howell poked at in this week’s Washington Post (Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Post). It was a strange effort at explaining the massive disparity between young fathers and young mothers who read the paper, but it touched on some of the same themes as Von Hahn (including the observation that “women read magazines avidly, and as one young woman told me, magazine ink doesn't rub off on her hands.”) I don’t know who depressed me more, Howell or Von Hahn, but I do wonder if their claims are true and a generation of young women are more politically checked out than their male counterparts.